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.