Tuesday, June 16, 2015

Incubating: take one

It all started with a teeny tiny pip! 
So a few weeks ago we bought a nice new incubator, a couple of eggs, and did a bunch of reading on incubating. I was using a method that held temperature and humidity steady until the last few days. I read quite a bit about it, and really thought we were ready. Unfortunately, we only had 6 eggs pip and 4 survived! It seems New Jersey may have a bit too high humidity to really get a proper gauge. So, I won't call it a fail, but out of the 18 that were fertile and growing, we only have a handful to show for it. Sigh..

Here's a nice little play by play of the exciting though, because believe me, it was still VERY exciting!!
This is the hatching of one of our mixes, it's a Sultan/Cochin bantam mix. 
Top left is it's little wing popping out. This was about 18 hours after it's first pip, hatching is a long process. 
Bottom left is it breaking the shell all the way around so it can "unzip" the shell around it.
The right pictures is it 75% pushed out of the shell. Only a few minutes until it was free!



Finally free, all it had to do was sleep and dry off a bit. 

Here's hoping our next hatch goes a bit better!