One duck egg started pipping yesterday (really early!), but didn’t make it out of the egg. A second egg pipped this morning and we had a little duckling in the incubator by the afternoon.
Tag: incubator
New hatchling count
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.
New Hatchlings
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.
And hatching!
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.
The chicken eggs are pipping!
Pipping!
Proto-chickens and Proto-ducks — 8 days later
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!
Proto-chickens and Proto-ducks
Trying again with the bigger, better incubator — 22 duck eggs and 19 chicken eggs.
Tiny Ducky
We finally know what a newly hatched duck looks like! The little ones we got last year were a week or three old when we bought them, so we’d never seen exactly how tiny a duckling can be.
A Proto-Duck Emerges
Awww — one little ducky has hatched!
Incubators
We tried a cheap forced-air incubator from Amazon.
All of these little rectangular boxes seem to have the same design flaw: the fan and heater are in one corner of the incubator, and the hot air blows out of one side of the box. So there are really hot spots in the incubator and relatively cold spots.
Since we had a bad hatch rate (1 of 8) with the thing, we decided to get a bigger, better incubator. After researching a lot of options, we got the Farm Innovators 4250 — lots of space for eggs, a centrally located heater and fan that blow air all around, and a humidity sensor (looks to be the same DHT-11 that we use in our sensor). We’ll collect eggs and get a large batch going in a few weeks.
