Activities at Home

It is a lot of fun to hatch chicks! We have already done two hatches this year, and the third is in the incubator right now. Of course, hatch day is our favorite part of the cycle. We always move the incubator from the top of the refrigerator where it sits for three weeks, to the floor in the living room where we can watch what happens. Every little while during the day, someone grabs a flashlight or turns on the flashlight app on a phone to get a count, and we rejoice at each new chick that emerges. The first two hatches this year had few enough viable eggs that we didn’t have to take the chicks out to make room for the last ones to hatch, so we left them all in for about 36 hours after the first one emerged.

The cat likes hatch day, too, although she gets quite frustrated. Just before this picture was taken, she had carefully sniffed her way all around the incubator, trying to find a way in to the chicken dinner she could smell. She’s never been able to get inside, but that doesn’t stop her trying!

It’s even more exciting when we open the incubator and take the babies out! This one is a Barred Rock.

The white ones, and some of the black ones, are mixed-breed. The mothers were a cross between hybrids and Barred Rock, and the rooster is a Black Australorp, we think. Some of the black ones are purebred Barred Rock, and some are a cross between Barred Rock and Black Australorp; we have one Black Australorp in the pen with the Barred Rock hens and rooster.

After taking the babies out of the incubator, they go to the chicken coop. This is the new coop that James built to replace the one that burned in March. It is a much-improved version! (And notice the garden tool storage on the front? Genius! That was one of James’s projects while his shoulder healed from being dislocated and fractured in August.) The small window to the left is in the brooder; the rest of the building is open. The babies start out in the brooder, a cupboard about waist-high that we can keep warm and draft-free, and when they are bigger, they graduate to the floor and then can go outside through a door on the back wall.

This is the brooder cupboard. Instead of heat lamps, we now use a heat plate, which the chicks can go under for warmth as if under a mother hen. They come out into the cold to eat and drink, mimicking the way they would live with a mother. We did have to add a small space heater for the first couple of days, as both hatch days were very cold, wintry stormy days and the babies couldn’t get warm enough with just the heat plate.

As the babies got older, we opened the window for ventilation and to cool them down so their feathers would grow faster. They crowded into the window to watch the world go by, and went crazy for worms that we poked through the screen to them. One thing they watch is the cat who has been known to pull chicks through cracks around the door of the coop. She no longer can, with the new, improved design, but she still sits on the step and smells longingly, just waiting for us to be careless and let her in.

The second hatch was the most interesting I have ever had. There were 38 eggs in the incubator after I candled on Day 10. They started hatching Tuesday night. Wednesday morning we saw one that was about halfway cracked around, but then it stopped progressing and was the same in the evening, so we reckoned the chick had died. Thursday morning they were finished hatching, so I opened the incubator to take the 33 chicks to the brooder. As I started picking them up, the one that was halfway cracked started peeping! That was quite a surprise. After I took the babies out, I came back to check on that one. It was dried into the shell, but very much alive. Now we had a quandry. It is not advisable to help a chick out of the shell, because they have to struggle in order to be strong enough to live. One that we helped never was able to stand up, but kept flopping on its back and died after a couple of days. We discussed this one briefly and concluded that if we left it alone, it would certainly die, because it was obviously totally stuck in the shell. We decided to help it out and give it a chance, so we peeled the shell off. Sure enough, it started flopping onto its back–but within an hour it was standing up, walking around, just fine! When it was dry, I took it out to the brooder. When I got there, I was horrified to find a chick laying just outside the heat plate, flat, cold and stiff. Three more under the heat plate were also flat out, being walked on, getting cold. (Remember what I said about a winter storm? The heater hadn’t gotten the cupboard very warm yet.) They were still gasping, so I grabbed all four and hurried into the house, where I put them into the incubator and turned it on again. I was hopeful that two or three might revive, but that one was obviously dead. After another hour I went out to check again, and found a few more in bad shape, so they came in, too, and I worked on the brooder again to make it warm enough for the rest, with little enough space under the heat plate that they couldn’t get on top each other. By this time, the three in the first group that were looking half alive were up and around–and the “dead” one was moving! Within two or three hours after I brought them in, all of the rescued ones were walking around, fluffy and fine as if nothing had happened, except that one had lost some of the down on its back when others climbed on top of it. After a couple more hours, I returned all of them to the brooder, and they are still alive and well now. It is impossible to pick them out of the others!