We are Hatching Eggs!

Follow our progress here on the web.

We arrived home from Mimi and Papa's Sunday night, May 19th,2002 with 32 chicken eggs. Some brown, some white and some white banties. Being new to this we thought we might track the progress. We turned the eggs every 5 hours we were awake: at 7:00am, 12:00pm, 5:00pm and 10:00pm. We marked the eggs so we could tell where each egg was in it's rotation. You will also find photos of the coop building and the chickens as they have grown.

Approximately 50% of the eggs hatched successfully and of that we had a near perfect 50/50 mix of roosters to hens. We gave many of the chickens away and, after loosing one, ended up with two roosters and two hens. As time has passed we have tried to slowly build our flock to five or six hens and eliminate one rooster.

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It's alive! Here is a photo of one of the first chickens breaking through the shell. They use an egg tooth on their beak to break through. This egg tooth falls off after a few days.	Candling the eggs. Candling the eggs at or around 10 days gives us some idea of which eggs will hatch. We candled by holding a flashlight up to the egg in a dark room. Here are the best photos of the inside of our eggs. This on is a large white egg. If we could show you this in real time you could actually see the black spot and the blood vessels moving. Very cool!
The building of the coop. Jacob is building the coop at day 18. According to our observation at this point 28 of our 32 eggs developed. However, it appeared 3 of these did not reach full development. The contents of these 3 were very muddy and did not fill the egg, suggesting the embryos did not make it. The other 25 eggs were so full you could see only the air bubble at the large end of the egg. The chicks started "peeping" in another 2 days and they started hatching shortly thereafter.	Ten Days Old Here are the chicks at 10 days old. The coop is mostly built at this point but they were living inside. In another two weeks they would be ready to move out to their new home.
Dinosaur This is Dinosaur at ten days. He is now the dominant rooster. He was first to hatch so we said he should be one to stay regardless but he has some aggression issues.
Ruler of the Roost Here is Dinosaur at about 5 months old. Even at that point he had himself established as ruler of the roost.