Baby Chicks Are Hatching!!!
- Patrick Patton
- May 1
- 2 min read
For the first time ever, my family is hatching a clutch of homegrown chicks! We have two roosters and 9 hens, so we decided to get an incubator so we can incubate, hatch, and raise chickens!
Step one was making certain we had at least some fertilized eggs, which is simple enough. When we cook eggs, we just look for the little bullseye on the yolk that indicates a fertilized egg. After that, we collected a clutch of fresh eggs to incubate.
By day 8 we were able to see vasculature throughout when we candled the eggs. One of the white eggs had nothing growing inside, and the blue and green eggs were difficult to see for certain, but it looked like 11 out of 12 were growing!
We did our best to manually keep the humidity at the proper level (yes, it's a little low in the picture below—I should have taken the photo after we added water, but oh well).
The eggs are automatically turned several times a day in the incubator, and the temperature is maintained at 99.5 degrees F.
On Day 18, I removed the egg turner and positioned the large end of the eggs so there would be no obstruction when the chicks hatch. I opened the vent all the way and turned the humidity up and prepared for lockdown! We're at the final stretch!!!
While we waited, I smoked some chicken legs and glazed them with a homemade BBQ sauce. I'm looking forward to processing and smoking some homegrown chickens soon!
One of our Roosters, Angelo, is very noisy, mean to the girls. The flock doesn't really like him all that much (they are definitely Sherman's girls), and I"m sure our neighbors don't like him either (he starts early—around 2:30 AM) so once we are sure we have some baby roosters to replace him, Angelo will be the first to be processed.
This morning we woke up to two different eggs with cracks in them. By the time we left for work and school, there were four different eggs with cracks in them. We could even hear the little babies chirping from inside the eggs!
And here's the moment our first baby hatched, along with more photos and video below!
I'll be sure to take pictures and video for an update on these babies very soon!
Wow look at that! Welcome to the world "Big Foot"!