Category Archives: Hatching Chicks

Chicks everywhere

My Barred Rock has been sitting on 7 eggs and yesterday she hatched out two and today one.  It is so exciting to see what color they are and see them running to hide under momma hen.  They are Silkies and gosh, they are so small.

I have four other hens that are broody, too.  I just keep taking them off the eggs/nests and throwing them out into the chicken yard.  I had to cage one of them.  If you do that for a couple days, the hen will give up on sitting on eggs.  I need four cages.  lol

All three of these chicks look like they are mixed Silkie.  In other words, multiple colors on the body.  I really like it when they look different so I can tell them apart.  As I said, I name them then and there is no leaving the yard after that is done.

I now have 96 chickens but the majority of them are under 6 months.  My incubator is full also.  I love the chicks so I will probably just enjoy the babies and then sell them as they get about 6 months old.  You get more money for them…15 bucks or so and you get the joy of seeing them grow.   You also get a chance to see if any of them are going to be some great color you want to keep in your flock.

Time for bed…go to bed with the chickens and get up with them…or at least on their time schedule.  My husband is retiring in a few months and we will be doing some serious sleeping-in.  He has worked for 40 years getting up at 5am during the week.  Time to relax and enjoy our life together.  Of course, I have lots of chicken projects for him when he retires.

Hatching chicks is addictive

OMG, I love waking up in the morning to hear little peeping coming from my incubator.

Yesterday morning, I heard peeping and found a black little Silkie chick standing  in the incubator.  It is amazing to me that a chick can peck its way out of the shell and be walking around the next morning.  I always check the eggs just before I go to bed and there wasn’t even a chip or crack in any of the eggs.

Then this morning, I heard peeping again.  Much to my delight, two baby chicks.  The dark one was up and trying to walk and was actually pretty dry looking.  The little grey one was still trying to get up on its feet and still a little damp looking.  They fluff out so quickly.   The dark one I put into the bath tub with the other four chicks that have hatched out in the last week or so.  The little grey one I will keep under a heat lamp by itself for a few more hours.  She just looks like she wants to sleep.

I call all my chicks “she” from the time they are hatched.  I like to think I am speaking it into existence.  Hens are easier to sell and of course, there is the whole egg thing.  Not much production from the rooster.  As my husband so eloquently put it,” the hens lay the eggs and the roosters lay the hens. ” So unless you want fertilized eggs, there isn’t much use for the rooster.  And yes, the chickens do lay eggs without a rooster.

I do feel the rooster protects the hens.  My neighbor said there was a stray cat in my yard the other day looking like he wanted chicken for dinner.  He said the rooster charged the cat a number of times and the cat left the premises.  I wish I could have seen that.

The rooster is also frequently more colorful than the hen and of course, who doesn’t love the sound of a rooster at 5am.  lol

If you look at the website backyardchickens.com you will see I am not the only person addicted to chickens or hatching  out chicks.  That website has been a wealth of knowledge for me.

Well, I have three more eggs in my incubator that should hatch in the next day or so and my second incubator is loaded down with eggs but they won’t start hatching until the end of the month.  Oh yeah, don’t wash your eggs if you want to hatch them.  There is this protective “boom” on the egg that you don’t want to wash away.

Leah, a fellow chicken raiser, showed me a great system for hatching eggs.  She uses two incubators.  One incubator has the egg turner in it and the other does not.

I write the date I put the egg into the incubator and I know 21 days later I will have a chick if all goes well.   I remove the eggs as each egg reaches the 18th day and put it into the second incubator to hatch.  You just lie the egg down and leave it to hatch now.

Don’t forget to set the incubator up 24 to 48 hours ahead of your date you intend to put eggs in it.  You need to get your temperature and humidity correct before adding eggs.  So, I don’t get the second incubator ready until day 16.  That gives me two days to make sure the incubator is working correctly.  And please go buy a hydrogrometer (I think that is what it is called) to check your humidity and temp.  You can see it in the next picture.  I got mine at Walmart for about 6 bucks, I think.

So let’s say its day 18, and four of the eggs need to go into the second incubator.  You put them in the second incubator and they will hatch there in three days.  The next day, you have three eggs that need to go into the second incubator.  QUICKLY, open the incubator and put the eggs in.  I say quickly because once the eggs reach the 18th day, they should go into “lock down.”  That means you don’t turn the eggs and you normally would not open the lid.

Because I do not get forty eggs in one day, I use this system and it works fine for me.  Just don’t have the second incubator open any longer than you must.   You might have to add more water and you need to add more eggs as the 18th day arrives.

Once the egg hatches and the chick emerges, leave her in there.  Let her dry some and get her walking legs though wobbly they will be.  I have read you leave them in the incubator after hatched for 24 hours.  Doesn’t happen for me.  I am so excited.  Again, I quickly grab the baby chick and the shell and remove them to be put under a heat lamp with the temperature already at 100 degrees.  I have a themometer lying in the bed where the new chick is will be so I am sure the temp is not too hot or too cold.

This box is about a 10×10 inch with a folded t-shirt in it.  She will stay in it until I see she is walking around and pretty much fluffed out…usually a matter of hours.   The heat lamp is red.  This is the little grey chick hatched this morning.

I use stained t-shirts or old towels for the bedding.   Of course, I have washed them and they are clean.  I think the babies can get better footing on the t-shirts and get up and going faster.  I have seen other people use plastic containers with wood shavings.  Slippery to me and I think I read you shouldn’t use wood shavings.  Chicks eat anything.

These are chicks in the bath tub under the red heat lamp.  Chicks needs to have 100 degree temperature for the first two weeks.  The little chick at the bottom of the picture  is the dark chick that hatched out this morning.

Your chicks will not need food or water for three days but I always have it in the chick’s yard/tub/box waiting for them to get the urge.  The yellow yoke was the baby’s food and water and it was absorbed into the chick thru the rectum area.  That is what keeps them satisfied for a couple days.  That is why chicken wholesalers can send baby chicks thru the mail when they are one day old.

I hope the things I tell you are informative.  I really enjoy my chickens as you can probably tell.  It really gives me something to look forward to each morning after I get my hubby off to work.  As soon as it is daylight, I am outside feeding my chickens and seeing that all of them made it thru the night.  I have a couple of broody hens right now and I soon will be checking them daily to see if any new baby chicks have hatched.

My chicken yard looks rather red-neck right now but I have lots of plans to make my chicken yard/houses look like a nice neighborhood.  I am going to put a privacy fence around their yard, too.  It is fun for me to make drawings and make plans for the future for their surroundings.

Maybe it is the motherly side of me or the creative side of me or the control freak part of me that makes me enjoy this life so much.  I am looking forward to the fall when we will prepare our soil for our first garden, if all goes well.  Vegetable seeds are so cheap and any extra food we grow and don’t eat will go to our relatives first and then the chickens.

This is indeed, a quiet and peaceable life.  I love it.

Helping chick out of shell

The date had past for the eggs to hatch in the incubator and I waited a couple more days just to be sure.  Then one of the four eggs hatched so I waited a couple more days.   I wanted to put more eggs in the incubator and start a new batch so I took the the remaining three eggs out.

Two of the eggs felt heavy like there were chicks inside so I carefully hit the fat end of the egg enough to make a small crack and then peeled it open until I could see the beak.   The large end of the egg is where the head will be and it will start pecking or zipping it’s way out.  I made a big enough hole so the chick could get air and put it back into the incubator.  I could see it was alive because there was throbbing of the skin and the beak was moving.

The second egg pretty much went the same way…live chick, not ready to be hatched so I put it back in the incubator after assuring myself that the chick could get air.  The membrane inside the shell is sometimes soft if there is a lot of moisture and then looks like paper if it is dryer in the incubator.  Then there seems to be another clear membrane that can shrink wrap the chick if there is not enough moisture.

I was really glad I opened the second egg because I think the chick was in there so tightly that it might not have been able to move around to zip out of the egg.  I have opened a couple eggs after the due date had past and there was a perfectly healthy chick in there dead.   I can only assume the chick could not get out and the air pocket was gone.  Who knows?

I have opened many eggs and the chicks have survived.  I left the two chicks for a day and the chicks had not tried to get out of the shell.  I opened the shell carefully so I could see the chicks bottom but yet not pull it out of the shell and disconnect it.  I could see there was some yellow yoke that had not been absorbed into the chick yet so I knew I needed to leave the chick alone for another day.   Which is what I did.

So the next day, I carefully checked the yoke sac and it was gone so I removed the chick and carefully cut the chick loose.  I put a little flour on its bottom to assure it’s bottom didn’t stick to the material that I was going to lie it on.  I put the chick under a heat lamp on a tshirt inside a small box and let it dry out.  It wiggled alot and started drying itself off and was looking fluffy.  After about twelve hours, I realized the heat lamp made the chick more like 105 instead of 99/100 and it looked distressed.  I took some sugar water and a straw and slowly gave it a sip of water.  It’s head was rather limp and it was acting really weak.  So sad.  But, much to my delight, an hour later the chick was trying to stand up and seemed much stronger.

I have since put the chick outside with another momma hen who just hatched a baby chick two days ago.  I try to get the chick with a momma right away.  When I have kept a chick by herself, it died.

The second chick is still in the incubator.  I will wait and see when the yoke is absorbed before I take any further steps.

So, don’t be afraid to help the chick out of the shell.  Be sure to keep the chick really warm…about 99/100 degrees.  If there is any bleeding or gooey stuff on its bottom, be sure and use flour to stop the moist end from sticking to any material.  If it starts to pull away and wiggle around and it sticks, it could make it bleed more and there isn’t that much blood in a small chick.

Good luck with your baby chicks.  They are a joy.

Hens fighting over chicks

It is very important to keep your sitting hen away from other chickens.   Unfortunately, I learned the hard way.

I miscalculated the hatch date on my white Silkie’s eggs and had another hen and her 4 month old chick in the same yard.   I usually go outside pretty much when it is daylight just to make sure everyone is still there and no one is in a distressed situation.    But, my husband had the day off and we slept-in and then ate breakfast.

When I checked on my sitting hen, she had hatched out three chicks and two of them were about 15 inches from her nest and were dead.  I suspect there was a fight over the chicks.  The same thing happened to my neighbor the very same day.  I was so upset to find the perfectly healthy chicks dead.

Sometimes you make decisions that end up biting you in the butt.  I only have four adult white Silkies so I was trying to keep them in a separate yard to ensure the eggs would be fertilized only by my white rooster.  When the one white Silkie hen became broody, I moved the rooster and the other two hens out into the large Silkie yard after I  moved the other roosters out.

But, the two white hens didn’t seem to adjust well after two days.  They were sleeping in the middle of the yard instead of going into the house with the other hens.  They were also being picked on by the other hens.  The whole pecking order thing, I guess.  So,  I gave in and put them back into the pen with the broody hen thinking there was still a few days before the chicks would hatch.  I was thinking “I will think about it tomorrow” like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind.

So…….be sure and separate your broody hen with her eggs from your other hens.  If they fight over the babies, there is a good chance the babies will get injured or die.   I knew Silkie hens would steal each others eggs and baby chicks because they are excellent mothers but I had no idea they would want them so badly that the chick would end up getting killed.  So sad.

Incubator Chicks Hatched

Barred Rock Chicks

Chicks hatched in incubator March 23-26, 2011.

It is very exciting when you start hearing peeps in your incubator.  I can hardly sleep and I jump up and down all night checking to see if a chick has made it out of the shell.

I have read all kinds of articles about how to hatch out chicks and how to care for them.  I can’t say I have the best hatch rate because I don’t follow all the rules to the letter.

When you see the shell have a hole in it or crack, it COULD mean that it will immediately start trying to get out of the shell but most of  the time, it means you have hours to wait.  Darn it.  I guess it is exhausting trying to use that little tooth on top of the beak to break through the shell.  It really does look like the chick zippered it’s way out.  I love to watch the U-Tube chick hatching movies.

If  you have kept your temperature and humidity correct for 18 days and then put your eggs on lock-down for the remaining three days, you should start hearing peeps on the 21st day.  The humidity has to be higher those last few days, too.  If not, the membrane dries out and the chick gets “shrink wrapped” and will not be able to get out.  I have helped a few chicks out of the shell but it is a difficult decision to make.  Sometimes, the chick wasn’t really ready to come out and dies.  I think I read if the chick is not out in 24 hours after breaking through, then you might want to help.

So, I have 11 chicks hatched out.  One chick was hatched from a white Aracuana/Americauna hen, two were from dark eggs which are from the Barred Rock hens, two from Silkie eggs, and the rest are from green/blue eggs which are also Aracuana/Americuana hens.  I was going to sell them once they were hatched.  That is not happening because they are so cute.

If you just have hens  (no rooster) and they go broody, you can usually buy fertilized eggs in your area (Craigslist, Farm and Garden).  They are normally about a dollar an egg.   You would be surprised how many people don’t realize that a hen will lay eggs even if there is not a rooster.

Once my chicks start hatching out in the incubator, I leave them there for an hour or so though I read you can keep them in there for 24 hours.  I feel sorry for the chick lying on the wire flooring.

I did help a couple chicks out of their shells.  If the humidity isn’t right, the membrane dries out and the chick has a really difficult time getting out of the shell.  I used warm water and Q-tips to carefully push the membrane away from the chick.  Make sure the membrane is really wet and warm.  Also, you can chip the shell and then moisten the membrane again.  Make sure you just do it up near the chick’s head and get enough of the shell out of the way so the chick can emerge by itself.  It is really scary though because sometimes there is blood and a chick doesn’t have to lose much blood before it dies.

I have a plastic container (tub) that has either old t-shirts or towels in the bottom of it.  Then I have a heat lamp set up to get the temperature right for the baby chicks.   It should be around 98 degrees in order to dry the chick and keep it warm.

I put water out immediately though the chicks don’t really seem interested for awhile.  Once one chick starting drinking, the others seem to follow the leader.  The small water feeder is great for the baby chicks.   You don’t want the chicks to drown so make sure you use a water feeder or a lid with water that is not deep. Then I take a lid from a peanut butter container and put water in it and drop some grains of starter in it so it is more water then food.  Kind of mushy.  It is easier for the chicks to eat than the starter by itself.

I believe I read that chicks need about 6 square inches for living space.  I know you are going to think this is crazy but I have two bathrooms and we NEVER use the second tub.  I put a bunch of newspaper down in the bathtub and up the sides for about six inches.  That insulates the tub and keeps the mess down when you clean the tub out.  Then I put old t-shirts on top of the newspapers and take them off in layers as they get dirty.  This tub has the glass sliding doors so I hang the heat lamp over the top.   Then I have the water feeder and food feeder in there, too.  It works great.   I can actually go off for a day or two and not worry that the chicks are going to be eaten by a predator.   As long as you take the layered t-shirts off daily, there really isn’t a lot of odor but I do keep the bathroom door closed and the fan on.   Depending on the time of year, the chicks can go outside in two weeks.  But I still keep a heat lamp on them for a month or so.