Welcome to the Hatchery

I'll just start off with the picture everyone is waiting for: The fluffy chicks.

Taken right after I put fresh paper towels down in their tub, because otherwise it's just too nasty to show the world. Birds are gross.

I've never used an incubator before to hatch eggs, but we have fertilized eggs, thanks to our mean rooster that terrifies the children, but apparently fulfills his natural duties. A. was starting to talk about making a homemade incubator, but the temperature and humidity have to be within a very small range for the chicks to form correctly, and I was worried about cooking the chicks or something in a homemade incubator.

So then I looked into buying an incubator, but I could see right away that you definitely get what you pay for with incubators, and I did not want to spend hundreds of dollars on a good one.

And THEN, Jack's preschool teacher mentioned she was thinking of borrowing an incubator from one of the other teachers. This is one of the incubators they use at the school to hatch chicks with the kids every year, but obviously, that was not happening this year. So I offered to keep the incubator here and take care of the eggs given to me by the preschool teacher, along with thirteen eggs of our own.

It seemed sort of unlikely that putting the same eggs I eat for breakfast into a heated styrofoam box would result in chickens, but I took the leap of faith that is artificial incubation.

This incubator was a really nice one. Not only does it have a thermostat and temperature regulator, it also has a humidity read-out (although it required some experimentation to figure out how much water to put in at what intervals to keep the humidity at the right level). 

And most importantly, it turns the eggs automatically.

The eggs have to be turned so the forming chicks don't stick to the side of the egg. Without an automatic turner, I would have had to turn every single egg at least three times a day.

I could do without that kind of commitment. I found it hard enough to keep the humidity levels at the right place.

Anyway.

After ten days of incubation, the eggs can be candled. This is just shining a light through the egg, and is how you determine if the chicks are actually forming in there or if the egg is a dud. As you might guess from the name, this was originally done with an actual candle, although the best method in the modern day is using the light on a smart phone.

I found that really funny.

Anyway again.

The light from the phone showed us that all thirteen of our eggs seemed to be developing, and only two of the preschool teacher's eggs were. I removed the non-fertile eggs, leaving 15 eggs still in the incubator. And then, ten days later, I woke up to cheeping in the kitchen.

CHIIIIICK!

Chicken eggs are supposed to take 21 days to hatch, and that little dude (or, I hope, dudette) was early. It spent a lonely day in the incubator with nothing but eggs for company until the next chick started to break out just before the children's bedtime.

Of course, I let them stay awake to watch it hatch out all the way:

It took the chick about half an hour to get all the way out, by which time I was reeeeally tired and the children were reeeeally hyped up.

By the next morning, there were three more already hatched out and one more working its way out. We watched that one hatch out all the way, too.

Newly-hatched chicks are really not cute. They're pretty wet and unappealing, actually.

One more chick hatched out later that day, bringing our total to seven. 

They're supposed to stay in the incubator until they're dry, so I left them in there until that night and then transferred them to their feed-tub brooder in the kids' bathroom, leaving the remaining eight eggs in the incubator.

It's possible for chicken eggs to hatch as late as 25 days, so I'm going to leave those eight in there until tomorrow, although I don't really think they're going to do anything.

Two of the seven chicks are going to the preschool teacher, leaving us with only five chicks. I was planning on putting new eggs into the incubator and doing it all over again, but now one of our hens appears to have decided to go broody.

So maybe she'll do it for me. But if she doesn't, I can go broody myself, with the help of some modern machinery.