We got a chicken plucker for processing birds this year — the metal on the base is really thin, the motor appears to have come pre-rusted, and they somehow consistently put one of the rubber sticks in upside down … but we’ll see tomorrow how it works. Hopefully this will save us a lot of time.
Started with 19 chicken eggs in the incubator — two didn’t develop and were removed. Three eggs haven’t hatched (three of those have pipped, but haven’t really gotten anywhere since). One little guy is really weak and still in the incubator so the other little ones don’t sit and lay on him. That means we’ve got a thirteen little chickens in the brooder. And, early next week, the ducks should start hatching.
We’ve got a bunch of new little ones hatching — Anya has four little ones in the brooder, and we have two more in the incubator.
The first chick hatched this evening — and three more followed throughout the night. We’ve got four little ones out of their eggs and a bunch of eggs (hopefully) to go.
Pipping!
Scott and Anya candled all of the eggs tonight — of the 41 eggs, there are three that might not be developing. But all of the eggs are still in the incubator because there weren’t any obviously undeveloped eggs. If all of these eggs hatch, we’re going to have an absolute swarm of baby birds!
Trying again with the bigger, better incubator — 22 duck eggs and 19 chicken eggs.
We’re about to start incubating eight duck eggs, so I wanted to record the temperature and humidity settings that I’ve found for the chicken, duck, and turkey eggs (well, future turkey eggs! We managed to get five male turkeys last year)
| DUCKS | |||
| Start | End | Temp | Humidity |
| 1 | 25 | 99.5 | 55-58% |
| 26 | 28 | 98.5 | 65% |
| 28 | hatching | 97 | 70-80% |
| CHICKENS | |||
| Start | End | Temp | Humidity |
| 1 | 18 | 99.5-100.5 | 45-55% |
| 19 | Hatching | 99.5 | 65-70% |
| TURKEYS | |||
| Start | End | Temp | Humidity |
| 1 | 24 | 99-100 | 50-60% |
| 25 | Hatching | 99 | 65-70% |
We got our fence stuff! Eight rolls of 4′ welded wire fence and 50 t-posts.
We set up the coop mobile again — I got one of the PoultryNet fences from PremierOne — I spent a lot of time debating the “Plus” version of the fence before realizing that you could buy a whole lot of the FiberTuff posts for less than the additional price for the plus fence. And the FiberTuff posts work a lot better. Since the fence was working well, we decided to move the coop over to the pasture (and not herd the poultry across the yard twice a day!!!).
The “wheels” were made using two 4×4’s with sections of 5/8″ threaded rod that were inserted into old propane tube. This was attached to the 4×4 & wheels from one of our yard carts were attached. We were then able to push the coop across the yard.
