CHICKIE HATCH.
We are hatching baby chicks for the first time!!!! We ordered the hatching eggs from McMurray hatchery. If we had kept our rooster, we would have been able to use our own eggs to hatch. Maybe next time we get a roo we will keep him for a while just to be able to do hatch our own eggs. Something is so cool to me about it being so full circle! If you’re also new to chickens, here is a blog I wrote on taking care of them, and some of the things we use!
I wanted to make the process as easy as possible, so I got this egg incubator because it has a built-in egg turner and candler. It counts down the days to your hatch, and clearly shows you the temperature and the humidity levels. I kept a bottle of water next to the incubator for easy adjusting, and Grey was in charge of checking the humidity levels a few times a day. He LOVED having that job!
We are homeschooling Grey this year (and next year for sure) so we used this as part of school. I downloaded a unit study on chickens from Etsy, and embryo development, and ordered this Chick Life Cycle Exploration set so the kids could see what the chicks looked like through each stage.
We candled the eggs on day 8 - I am not gonna lie I felt a lot like Rachel on Friends when she can’t see her baby during the ultrasound lol. We for sure saw one developing but the rest I just couldn’t tell! One of the eggs had a crack, so we removed it and opened it up to look at the embryo. We compared it to the life cycle set I shared above, then said some sweet words and buried it in the front yard.
Okay, so 21 days came and went… we waited all the way until day 24 and then decided to open them up and see what happened. 😭
Out of 12 eggs, 2 stopped developing VERY early, 9 were just all yolk, and 1 was a fully developed chick that never hatched. It was a bummer! We buried the little chick in the yard, and looked at it a bit before we did. Homeschool, ya know.
We will try again! I’ll share my instagram highlight on the batch below, we have some more videos on the process.
