Well after 21 days… they hatched! Such an exciting time to see all these little baby birds appear in the incubator.

Before the Egg Hatching

Three days before the hatching, the incubator goes into “lockdown” phase. The automatic egg turner turns off and I removed the grid, also removed the red stopper, added additional water to the second port and opened the air vent all the way. The temperature stays around 99.5 degrees and the humidification increases from around 50% to 70%. Just monitored the incubator and added water to keep humidification up!

Hatching Day

One Friday morning, when I was working, the kids were at daycare, my husband heard some chirping. Initially thinking a bird had somehow flown into the house… he then realized there were birds in the house and the chicks were hatching! He moved the baby camera downstairs so I could catch some of the hatching on video. I left the chicks in the incubator for about 24 hours to stay in the heat and humidification and completely dry off. I then transitioned to them brooder. Three eggs, out of twelve, hadn’t hatched so I left them in the incubator to see what would happen. After a few hours we watched one of the eggs hatch! Such an exciting thing to watch! I left the last two eggs in the incubator for an extra day, but those two never hatched. So we had 10 out of 12 eggs hatch! The sweetest baby chicks were quite the entertainment for our three year old daughter!

Brooder

The week of the egg hatching I packed the kids up and headed back to tractor supply! I need to get the brooder supplies. We bought a big tub to put them in, a heater, water and feed supplies. I forgot the wood shavings for the bottom of the brooder so ended up heading back there the morning I moved the baby chicks over. The chicks seemed so happy in their new home! They quickly learned to eat and drink… which also meant they started using the bathroom. This leads to…

Pasty Butt

So I knew that once these chicks were born, the learning curve would start. The incubation period is the easy part, all I did was add water to allow humidification. But now… there are these little baby chicks that need support to thrive! So the Rhode Island Red chicks never seemed to have any issues, no pasty butt. However… the Barred Rock chicks had some trouble. I had to recruit my husband and a youtube video to get us through it, but I knew that if we didn’t we would have a whole new problem on our hands. So one night, we helped each chick pasty butt with a warm paper towel and they all seemed to be okay!

The plot twist

So… I sold all 10 chicks! Which was sad and brought a loottt of tears from my daughter. I felt guilty and a little confused, was it wrong to go through this whole process to just sell them!? Well, it was an unexpected situation, I was thinking we would keep them! But I quickly realized I could use more help from my husband and he wanted to build a large coup at the farm. Since we knew a family who wanted them, off the baby chicks went to their new home and we ordered a new batch of eggs to come in a few weeks! We choose to sell them and embrace what was clearly the right thing to do for the chicks and both families. Now we have the hope of a new hatching and know our first chicks went to a good home! Something to look forward to for everyone!