The farm where we keep goats has chickens and roosters. We are splitting duties with two other families and the deal is when it's our turn to feed the goats, we can have any eggs we can find. It has been a blast. Steve loves the chickens and has been talking about how we need chickens at our house. I am a frugal soul and started wondering how baby chickens are made.
Here are some fun facts I learned: 1 - just like humans, girl chickens are born with all the eggs they will produce. 2 - Chickens can produce approximately one egg every 18 hours depending on the breed. On the slow end chickens lay three eggs a week, on the high end they lay six. 3 - Chicken babies are made when roosters are present. Almost every single egg is fertilized when the boy chickens are around.
So I decided this would be the perfect inexpensive science project. We would grow our own chicken babies. We borrowed an incubator from the school, got some eggs from the farm, and put the whole kit and caboodle on the kitchen counter.
We learned a lot. For instance, lots of books and websites say "don't use dirty eggs" but they don't say why. The reason is because chicken babies breathe through the eggshell. If the egg is dirty it reduces the amount of oxygen they have access to. We used dirty eggs.
So many books and websites say to candle the eggs and throw away the ones that do not grow so they do not explode in the incubator. We did not know what we were doing and got rid of three babies that probably would have been just fine if we had let them grow. We did not know what we were looking for and missed some of the signs. And while we are talking about candling...one of the absolute coolest things is watching a chicken baby kick around inside of a shell. Totally insane!
The chickens hatched exactly 21 days after incubation and because I had COVID and had to stay home from work, I was able to see it. It was so incredibly awesome to watch them hatch. D named one of the chickens, Justin, before Steve or I woke up. Justin hatched in the wee hours of the morning so we missed it. Honey hatched around 11:00am and we watched as she took her first breaths outside of the shell. Lionel was the last to make an appearance at 2:30pm.
We started with 12 eggs. Three hatched, three we culled too soon, three stopped growing at early stages of development, two were fully formed but did not hatch, and one was not fertilized. We are loving this new adventure. Hopefully these are girl babies and not boy babies because we cannot have roosters in our neighborhood. We will know in approximately 6 to 8 months. *fingers crossed*
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