Hatching Chicks - Starting the Incubation

One tip for you, DON’T order or buy any eggs until you physically have had the incubator delivered. I ordered our incubator over a week ago and had expected it on Wednesday or Thursday of this week – I ordered the eggs afterwards and assumed (wrongly) that everything would arrive as promised.

Unfortunately this wasn’t the case and Friday night saw myself and my partner driving 30 miles to the Ebay sellers house to get another incubator as mine had been lost in the post. This wouldn’t usually be a problem, however as we already had the 12 eggs that we wanted to incubate, this couldn’t really wait as the viability of eggs reduces significantly after the 7th day. Therefore if you want little chicks, you really need to stick them into an incubator before day 7!

As soon as we got home, we read the incubator instructions and set it up and plugged it in. Another tip we read on the internet was that it’s a good idea to check that your incubator works properly by letting it run for at least 24-36 hours BEFORE you stick the eggs in. As our incubator is a very basic model, the temperature is already set to the ‘ideal’ which is 37.5 degrees Celsius. Therefore all we had to do was pop some water into one of the water troughs and turn it on. We turned it on, on Friday night and popped the eggs in on Saturday morning – we then watched the temperature in the incubator drop quite a lot – don’t panic if this happens! If you think about it, a lot of the space in the incubator has just been replaced by eggs which (should be) are room temperature, therefore it will take the incubator a long time to heat the eggs enough to get back to its original temperature.

Another interesting thing to remember – when you put the eggs in the incubator, this isn’t ‘day 1’, it’s actually day 0 and for the first 24 hours, you don’t need to turn the eggs – this starts on day 1. Therefore it meant that my partner and I were able to go out and about and not worry about turning the eggs as this didn’t start until this morning (Sunday). Remember to put an ‘X’ and a ‘O’ on each side of the eggs – this way you won’t screw up turning them. I did actually manage to print out a spreadsheet and we are filling it in every day and writing down the time we are turning them – we’re doing this 3 times a day. When we wake up, when we get back from work and before we go to bed. There’s loads of literature out there which tells you how many times you should turn eggs, from what I can gather:

- It should be an odd number of turns
- It should be a minimum of 3 times a day
- You should try and do it as quickly as possible but the eggs are OK for up to 30 minutes outside the incubator
- You shouldn’t turn the eggs after day 18 as you could damage the chick
- The pointy end of the egg should be slightly down
- The temperature in the room you have the incubator should be between 20 degrees and 25 degrees

My hands were shaking this morning as it was the first time we had to turn the eggs and I was so worried about hurting them or dropping one! I was also worried that some of the eggs have turned slightly speckled and having read various internet sites, that seems to suggest that the eggs is full of bacteria :-S That being said, it could just be the fact that the humidity has increased a lot so I guess we shall see when we candle them on day 8!

Hatching chicks - Choosing the right eggs

I'm very excited as literally, just in the last hour, both sets of eggs have arrived to me, at work!

I bought both off Ebay - maybe this was a foolish thing to do, however the feedback from both chicken breeders looked very impressive and they both made the following points:

1.  All the birds are unrelated
2. The birds are DEFRA registered 
3. The birds are free range
4. The seller stated the eggs had over 90% fertility
5. The seller said they would be posted Special Delivery (which meant they wouldn't go through the normal postal service so the eggs should be better protected)
6. The seller stated that the chickens were de-mited regularly
7. The seller stated that the eggs were fresh and laid within 48 hours of posting

So here we have the Black Orpington eggs and the smaller, Belgian d'uccle eggs! I thought I'd try and hatch both so that when the chickens are a bit larger and integrated into my friends larger flock, the Black Orpingtons could protect the smaller d'uccles, if the other chickens tried to pick on them (as they'll assume they're siblings?) whether this is the case or not, I don't know - either way, my friend is very happy to have some more Orpington chickens as that's what he has at the moment :-)

 As my incubator only has room for 10 eggs, I'm not sure if I'll be able to fit all 12 in - plus, I don't know if this will be to the detriment of the others. Unfortunately my incubator didn't turn up yesterday, therefore I am really hoping it was delivered today!

Whilst this is annoying - I don't actually have to incubate the eggs straight away. In fact, when reading lots of chicken hatching literature, a lot of books and websites state you're supposed to leave the eggs for a minimum of 48 hours (maximum 7 days - after this, the fertility of the eggs decreases rapidly) with the pointy side down and in a cool room.  When you're ready to put them in the incubator, you're supposed to let them gradually warm up to room temperature and then pop them in - Apparently, if you store the eggs the blunt side down, you could actually injure the chicks - Oh! And apparently you're supposed to tilt them 45 degrees and change that tilt twice a day...

I'm learning loads!

Hatching chicks - Choosing the right incubator

So, I've decided that I'm going to hatch chicks. Now what?

Do I buy the first eggs on Ebay that I see and stick them somewhere warm, wait a while and see if anything hatches? Do I buy an amazing £500 incubator that does everything I can possibly want (not that I know what I want, yet) and be assured that as I've spent so much money on the incubator, my eggs will certainly hatch and I'll have chickens soon? Do I buy every book under the sun, research this for months, only to realise that my chicks won't hatch until December, thus they'll be very small in very cold weather and might not survive?

When I get an idea in my head, I'm usually quite impatient and usually want to do it NOW - When my colleague at work agreed to take any chicks that I hatched, I immediately started researching how to hatch chicks and naively thought it would be easy. I'm sure it is for the 'seasoned pro' or the farmers who have broody hens and let nature take its course. However, as I'm neither a farmer, nor a seasoned pro, I was unsure as to where to get advice and what to do first.

I decided that the first thing I needed to do, was to choose a good incubator and after looking online for a few minutes I realised very quickly that those things aren't cheap! As I'm not in this for the money and I'm not keeping the chicks, I thought that spending a few hundred quid on an incubator (no matter how amazing it was) was slightly stupid, especially considering I'm not rich and still have a lot of student debt to pay off! So, I started researching the small incubators that were about £50-£80. The first thing I realised was,  most of the smaller, cheaper ones seemed to need manual turning - therefore YOU need to make sure you turn the eggs yourself, every day (preferably an odd number of times - minimum of 3 times a day). This means that for 18 days (you don't turn the eggs in the last 3 days as this could damage the chicks) you have to make sure that your social calendar is free enough to allow you to turn your eggs.

The incubator I have chosen is the 'Brinsea Mini Eco 10 Egg Incubator' which I bought from Ebay after reading the reviews from various websites. Apparently it has had a lot of success with first timers and can be used to 'educate children' - well, I don't have a very big ego and if it's good enough to teach children where chickens come from, then it's probably good enough for me to try and hatch chicks! As I'm writing this blog before even putting the eggs into the incubator, I can't vouch for it in any way - however I'm hoping in less than a month I can say how good it is (fingers crossed). It was less than £70 and holds 10 eggs - quite enough for me and hopefully few enough so that I can focus on the chicks when they hatch.

If anyone is interested in the 'spec' you can find it here, at the Brinsea website.

http://www.brinsea.com/products/mini.html and here, http://hatchingchickeneggs.org.uk/brinsea-mini-eco-and-mini-advance-incubators

I've read a lot of reviews from various websites and people seem to have been able to hatch chicks, first time (although I'm not totally naive and perhaps only the  good reviews are accepted and posted on their website?)

As this incubator doesn't have automatic egg turning, I'm going to make sure that I am available every day to turn the eggs. I'm also going to print out a spreadsheet with various columns and every time I turn the eggs, I'll mark it down, along with the day number and the time (I'll work this out exactly in a few days). The temperature has to be constant and as the Brinsea incubator has a thermometer, this shouldn't be too hard to monitor.



I ordered my incubator on Friday last week, so I am hoping that when I get back tonight, there is a Royal Mail missed delivery so I can pick it up tomorrow morning!

Hatching chicks - Why?

I've always wanted to hatch chickens.

We had chickens when we were children - 10 of them with such lovely names as 'Bruce Wayne' (My sisters and I were rather obsessed with Batman at the time) and 'Broody' (That one is self explanatory). They were rescue chickens, bantams, and all different shapes and colours. We used to feed them every day and collect their eggs - despite them being rescue chickens, they were actually quite trusting of us and we used to be able to pick them up, pop (some) of them on our laps, it was rather fun.

Now I'm an adult and unfortunately I'm not able to keep chickens due to renting and not owning my house and also due to the fact I work a full time job and am quite often away from home - Whilst chickens might not be the most demanding of 'pets', I don't think it's fair to have any bird or animal if you're not able to care for them properly.

So, whilst I've had a yearning desire to hatch chickens since I was young, this dream has had to be put on the 'to do' list - at least, it was until last week, when a work colleague of mine mentioned not only did he have a farm, he also wanted more chickens.........

Why hatch chickens, just to give them to someone else? Well, firstly, it's a learning curve - If you had asked me a week ago what 'Candling' was, I would have had no idea. I think I'll learn a lot from hatching eggs - from all parts of the process, from picking the right type of incubator to picking the right type of eggs and caring for the chicks correctly when they hatch. Secondly, I love nature, animals, birds - I'm one of those 'sad' people who always watching BBC Springwatch / Autumnwatch when it's on and one of those even sadder people who cry if any of the animals die.Thirdly, I'm a 29 year old woman with no children (one very spoilt cat) and if I can cope with looking after eggs for 21 days and chicks for a week, before giving them to my friend, perhaps in a couple of years I'll be ready to have kids, who knows?

Now that I've found a place for the chicks to go - a nice place where they will be able to live out their lives being free range chickens (which is the most important thing in my opinion - that the chickens have a happy life) I'm off to work out the best type of incubator to buy....