There's More Than One Way to Kill a Chicken

What a sad farming lesson we learned this late summer! For our first attempt at hatching our own chicks, we used the standard still air incubator with an egg turner and the 2 enclosed plastic thermometers. However, after seemingly constant monitoring of temperature and water levels, we only had moderate success; hatching 8 of 17 fertile eggs. Because there were several more live chicks that died after the first pip, we "conducted a thorough investigation" to see exactly what went wrong. The only conclusion we could come up with was that it was a hostile hatch environment for the little guys. As many standard incubators instruct, we removed the egg turner at the 18 day mark and placed the eggs on the wire screen. After the chicks hatched, they became living bowling balls for the other live chicks who were trapped in the shells waiting to come out. We feel like once the pip was made and then the egg was "bowled" over that the chick drowned before it actually hatched.

So for our next attempt, we had 30 fertile eggs. We moved the incubator down into the basement in a room that has Zero traffic flow (which we later found out that also meant Zero air flow), we purchased a new temperature and humidity probe (that we later found to be inaccurate by a few degrees as well as reading humidity improperly)and we were ever so cautious to place the eggs in a clean egg carton at the 18 day mark to make sure they would have enough stability while the others were hatching. We just knew we would improve our hatch rate... wouldn't you think so? Well, not at all. We went from bad to worse this time... NOT ONE EGG HATCHED! So we waited, and waited and waited. At about day 23 or 24 we finally decided to go in and see what was going on in there. We cracked open all the eggs and found a couple that died early in development, and a couple that died mid-way through development, but the majority were still alive... just wet and very slimy. Of course none of the chicks survived. What a sad day! This time we faulted the poor air circulation and poor temp and humidity readings. So much for a fancy Wal-mart temp probe!!

In order to reach our goal of getting some birds in the freezer before next year, we just decided to order some day old baby chicks from the hatchery. We chose the heritage New Hampshire Reds. Maybe next year we can fine tune this hatching business and hatch some Buff Orpington / New Hampshire crosses. Stay tuned...