Final count

So I had the wrong start count, I kept saying we started with 25 eggs but we actually had 30 eggs.  We now have 23 chicks, one chick passed away yesterday.  He was born with deformed feet and was unable to walk.  We broke rule #1 and helped him get out of the shell then kept him as comfortable as we could putting water and food next to him, making sure he was protected from the others and at the perfect temperature.  He fell asleep and didn't wake up.

We also had 6 eggs that did not hatch, we couldn't help ourselves we had to take a look and 2 eggs either were not fertilized or for some reason didn't develop at all.  4 were at various stages of development but were dead. 

We loaded the incubator with 48 new eggs and have the chicks moved to a larger home.  Tried to do another video, unfortunately you can hear the TV in the background better then the chicks chatting.  They were more interested in what I was doing though then showing off their vocal abilities.

This little brown guy is nosey and needs to know what is going on at all times!  When I look into the box he is the first one to stand up and see what I need.  Therefore he also gets lots of mommy kisses...

This is as many as I could get in one photo.  they are always on the move and no one will smile for the camera...

And here are a few other photos showing some of the babies...

 

The one exiting photo right here is a scratcher.  She really can dig down looking for bugs!

These guys are hanging out under the red heat lamp so the photo color is a little strange.  All the light colored ones are light yellow.

21 more days and we should have more chicks.  Hopefully Shane will get a new chicken coop built before I go nuts with this many chicks in the house.  At least we should have one chicken dinner a week taken care of!  I would like to raise a couple to laying age and see what the eggs look like.  Not 100% sure about Little Roo and if we see the color of eggs one of the white babies lay we will have an idea what genes Roo has.

Oh and the end of February I am getting some pure chicks from the feed store and I have hopes of getting a pure rooster (fingers crossed for an Americana which lays green eggs).  We are up to 9 or so eggs a day again although some days we have been getting as many as 12.  Queenie is giving an egg a day so she is a good one to breed for raising to be new laying hens.

18 chicks

I think all that are going to hatch have hatched.  A total of 18 little chicks out of the 25 eggs we started with.  Not bad for our first attempt, just over 70%.  Sites I have looked at vary in hatch rate, the best being about 80%.

so here are the babies...

A few more hatched after this photo but they pretty much look just like the rest of these.  right in the middle is Amy the only Americana egg that hatched...she is light brown with dark brown stripes on her back.

Once the incubator is cleaned out Shane wants to start another batch.  I am trying to talk him out of that.  Not sure how we are going to keep multiple batches of babies alive around Romeo.  As it is, I have to take Romeo with me when I leave to go to town to be sure he has no chance of hurting the babies!!!

The 18 chicks will grow fast so I need to get a larger box ready for them.  Oh see the yellow chick with the 1 black spot?  That is one of Queenies 2 babies, our leghorn who lays the white eggs.  Both her chicks are all yellow except one little black spot on their back. 

This was very exciting for all of us and I just hope when the time comes to butcher that things go smoother then with the rabbits.

Ok, it really was fun even though neither boy looks very excited.  Like always it is hard to keep the boys from bugging the little babies.  At least all our animals are well loved!

8 so far

We have 8 of the cutest little chickens!  I am hoping to open the incubator tonight and get the little guys out.  I have everything ready.  We are all so excited, it is hard to get pics inside the incubator but as soon as we get them out I will post a bunch of them!  They are little mutts.  Since we don't know what mix Little Roo is and not sure which chick is coming out of which egg and some of the chickens lay eggs that are hard to tell apart none of them will probably look too much like any of our girls either.  We had 1 white egg hatch so far (Queenie is the only one who lays white eggs and she is a Leghorn).  None of the green eggs have hatched.  Maybe next time.  We are very excited to try hatching more eggs!  The mixed breeds we raise are going to be for meat when they grow up.

baby chick cheeps

So we put our ears next to the incubator and we heard baby chick cheeps!  I used a flash light to look in at the eggs and 3 have little cracks or holes in them!  One was actually rocking from side to side as the little guy was working his way out.  I don't know if I can wait!!!  All 3 eggs that appear to be hatching are brown.  Keep your fingers crossed that tomorrow we will have pics of the new babies!

squint and tilt your head

See the red lines inside the egg?  These are blood vessels during the first days after putting the eggs into the incubator.  They are hard to see especially with the darker or thicker egg shells.

As a comparison this is a candling of an egg that appears to have either not been fertilized or for some reason did not develop once put into the incubator.  This is also a lighter colored shell then the first image.

And this is a baby chick about 3 days later. Isn't he cute?

Now I am going to attach a video and hopefully it will work.  I find it VERY exciting!  We are talking on the video so be warned if you don't want anyone around you to hear what is going on.

At the very end you can see the darker circle that is his eye moving close to the shell.

I got so excited the first time we saw the babies moving around I almost dropped the egg.  I sure hope some of them make it to hatching...

This has become quite the family project as you can tell everyone is front and center when it is time to check on the babies.

There are some eggs that have not developed and there are some that have a blood ring that happens when the embryo dies early in development and the egg looks like the 2nd image except you see a red line running around the center of the egg.

stormy night

So just as the boys and I were heading to bed last night...total darkness.  Everyone fumbled their way to the living room and I started lighting candles and finding emergency candles and flashlights.  Shane went into MacGyver mode to keep the incubator going so our baby chicks would be ok.  He found a power inverter that we had for camping and the battery from our trolling motor had just been charged up and they were enough to keep things going.   I was so stressed, we were worried that the battery wouldn't hold out so we didn't get much rest until the lights were back on around 3 am.  After we went to bed I kept waking up in a panic every few minutes worried that the power went out again and the chicks were getting cold. 

But all is just fine this morning.  And hopefully no babies were lost last night.  The storm has settled and even the chickens and turkey have come out to see how things are.  Now I have hopes of catching a quick nap before starting dinner...

OMG

Ok, so tonight we candled some eggs and it was so cool!  The little chicks are moving around in there!!!  Oh darn I should have tried to video tape it!  It is amazing.  I sure hope some of them make it to hatch!!!!!!

Chicken Lesson

After a roo has mated with a hen just once she will continue to lay fertilized eggs for at least 2 weeks and can be as long as a month due to a special pouch in her reproductive tract that will store the semen.  As time goes by the amount becomes less and less so after 2 weeks not necessarily all eggs can be incubated to produce a living chick though.

So no need to worry about little Roo wearing himself out taking care of all 17 of our girls every day.

I am still trying to get some photos to turn out that show our little guys development inside the egg.  I will try again tonight.

Candling

So we candled some of the eggs last night, we were excited to see, well, if we could see anything.  And on a few eggs we could see vein development!

I am going to attempt to take photos and if they turn out I will post them. 

Still a long way to go before baby chicks and so many things can go wrong between now and then.  In addition to us not knowing exactly how efficient Little Roo is, we also have the fact that our girls are still young (under a year). 

A friend of Vic's wants to trade some of his eggs for some of our green eggs that he can incubate.  This will give us a chance to bring in some new blood.  He has totally free range chickens at his place south of town.  They just wander around and from what I understand his girls raise their own young and he has not had to do much over the last few years except collect the eggs.  Shane estimates he has around 40 chickens running all over.

On a sad note, Shane decided he just can not continue to butcher the baby bunnies.  We put an ad up on craigslist and have someone coming at 10 today to get all the rabbits, including the triplets.  I had wanted to keep the triplets (the breeding trio) so just in case times got bad we could attempt to raise them for meat again.  But deep down inside Shane is a big softy.  Even Vic said he can't butcher them either and the cost to hire someone would make for very expensive meat.  So we will focus on our chicken and turkey girls.  Once we are done with these eggs in the incubator we are still talking about getting some quail eggs and giving them another try. 

We also hope that we can incubate some baby turkeys once our girls start to lay their eggs.  At this point the turkeys are just freeloaders like the rabbits.  If we are successful with turkeys then instead of having turkey only once a year we will be having it once a month!  Yum, that is my favorite meal!!!!

Web site

Just letting you all know that if you go to www.triplezfarms.com you will see I have a temp page up!  I wrote this page from scratch and I am very proud of it.  I still have LOTS of work but at least there is something there! 

I was so excited and so I called the boys in to see my master piece and Sky responded "that is it?"  so I pulled up my source code to show him the work it took to get that up and he was less then impressed.

I am going to (slowly I am sure) get my site up and running and in my mind it will be the coolest thing EVER!  Partly because when I first met Shane I thought programming was too complicated.  I took 1 programming class back in the 80's and it was so confusing.  I never thought I would ever be able to create my own site from scratch.

Wanted...dead

Ok, now to start with DON'T LAUGH!

This is Tom and Tom's days are numbered!

I went out to give my chicken and turkey girls their daily treat of bread, flax oil, yogurt and various left overs from the fridge and I bent down to pet Birdis and Tom pecked my hand and it really hurt, left a mark but did not draw blood.  I swatted at him and told him to go away and started petting Birdis again and Tom came up to me and hit me in the face with his right wing.  My eyes started to water and the pain was unreal!  I got up and kicked at him but felt off balance and disorientated so I came into the house and called for Shane.  Sky came and took the fresh eggs out of my hand and Brady said "told you we should have had turkey for new years".  All the men were ready to take Tom out right then and there for me...my band of protectors.

Here is what IS going to happen.  As soon as we have turkey eggs hatched and know we have a male Tom is dinner!  My hopes are that one of the eggs from Jenny will be a male then we can use that tom with my pretty turkey girls.  These 2 turkeys are so mean!  my girls are the sweetest things ever and I really worry that Tom and Jenny's bad behavior will rub off on my girls since it is obvious that my girls good behavior isn't going the other way!  If I can get my hands on another Tom before then...who wants the drum stick?  I would like to get some babies out of this tom before then but since turkeys don't continually lay eggs I have to wait until they decide the time is right. 

So today I got beat up by a turkey.  My nose still hurts and pain radiates out from it in a headache.  We need to be careful not to turn our backs on this guy!

A lesson in chickens

Hello, we have embarked on a new adventure!  We have revved up the incubator and are attempting to hatch our first batch of chickens!

Step 1 was to be sure our eggs are fertilized.  I have only seen Little Roo "get busy" once so we cracked open one of the eggs from yesterday that have not been refrigerated.  This is what I found:

Now look closely at the glare spot on the lower right side of the upper photo.  Now look at the same area on the lower egg with no flash.  You will see a white donut shape in the yoke.

See it?  Since it is a donut and not just a spot then we can assume this is a fertilized egg.  This is called the blastoderm and by the time an egg is layed it has already started dividing to form an embryo.  Interesting isn't it? 

Here is my incubator

And I put the 17 eggs collected over the last 3 days that have not been refrigerated.  Ideally the eggs are kept above 50 degrees for no more than a week for the best hatch rate. 

I have a nice combination of colors:  white, green and various brown.  Eggs hatch at 21 days (give or take a day or two).  Ideally the eggs should come from chickens that are over 12 months.  My girls are not a year yet.  But, we are excited to see how things work!  Keeping our fingers crossed!

The chickens that hatch from these eggs will be raised for meat.  We are not sure exactly what mix breed Little Roo is, I was told he should pass on the olive green egg gene but, no way to know for sure.  If we get a new roo this year when I get my little chickens then I will re-think what roos I want to keep. 

Kinda hard to see what is going on from the top "windows".  the yellow trays rock back and forth with the timer "turning" the eggs for proper chicken development.  At this point we need to keep the temperature at 99 - 99.5 degrees Fahrenheit, and above 45 % humidity.  Our Incubator is in Celsius so what should the setting be?  (jeopardy theme plays in the background) times up!

If you said 37.5ish then you would be correct!

I will keep you all up to date on how things are going.  I do have a candle light so I will be attempting to learn to candle the eggs as time goes by!

Re-evaluate

Ok, so we had our first Bunny Butcher.  Shane said he "dispatched the animals".  There were tears, I am not going to pretend it all went smooth.  We ended up using Brady's 22, I thought that would make things quicker and less chance of error.  It was horrible, the bunnies would sit and kick and kick although I knew they were dead it was still sad.  Sky cried, I cried and Shane was feeling a bit sick to his stomach.  We saved the fur and I am going to try and get what I need to process them.  The boys want gloves...we'll see what I can do.  I cleaned and quartered the 2 rabbits and cooked them up last night for dinner.  Shane had a hard time swallowing.  The meat was tougher then the ones we have bought at the butcher, not sure if that is because it was fresh and not frozen or breed or what.  Sky ate the most singing "bunny bunny butt" didn't take him long to get over the whole process. 

Are we going to continue with rabbit farming?  I am going to leave that up to the triple Zs.  It gets spendy feeding so many during the winter and Shane has to decide if he wants to keep going.  Even though we changed and went to all white rabbits, they are so darn cute!  Even Vic said after taking care of them for us when we were out of town for the holidays that he couldn't eat one of them.

So what I know for sure is we are going to expand our chickens.  Raise some for butcher and I want to add a couple new egg colors to my flock.  I got a really nice incubator for Christmas so I want to give it a try.  We are thinking about ordering some quail eggs and giving that another chance but I don't know for sure yet.

We have plans to hatch turkey eggs and if we get a new Tom then the current Tom will be dinner.  He is such a jerk!  And my turkey girls are so sweet.  Jenny will also be hitting the dinner table, she is pretty but very stand offish and I like to cuddle my girls.  I hope to get some eggs from Jenny come spring though.  I want to try cooking up one of the turkey eggs but after that we will be trying to hatch them to grow for meat.

Little Roo is showing interest in the girls but I want to be sure he is good to go before attempting to hatch any eggs we get since we are still not getting too many eggs each day.

So that is about all that has been going on since we got back from Spokane.  I have been so tired and I have to get the energy to get the house all cleaned up and laundry done and ready for the boys to go back to school.  It will be so nice to have a quiet house during the day again!!!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!