Chick update--all are dead
The little chick who hatched in the night never did stand up properly. It just died. When I got up in the morning, the chick that had been okay yesterday was dead. I've concluded it overheated in the warmer Mr. K set up for it. It makes me sick to think about.
Mr. K had two sets of eggs that were started in the incubator three days apart. I still hear little peeps from the eggs, but I'm losing hope that we'll actually have success this year. The peeps are getting fainter and farther apart. Sometimes the chicks die in the eggs if they aren't strong enough to peck their way out.
K is in bed. N is in our living room, reading part of a Trixie to J. It's cute.
5 Comments:
Oh that is sad, can you open the eggs for chickens or is that a really bad thing to do?
I can't wait till H stops his eating books phase and gets a little older so i can read him Trixie hehe
Sorry to read that they didn't make it :-(
We used to get the hen to set the eggs. We never used an incubator. We kept them in an egg carton in a cool place (not the fridge) and when we had 6-8 we'd put them back under a broody hen all together.
One of our hens produced one chick this season. I think it's a boy. Once we confirm that, we'll eat him. I think all our Buff Orpingtons have gone broody this year, but the other three kept switching nests or crushed their eggs or something so we only got the one chick naturally. Our black hens (half Easter egg/half barred rock) don't go broody.
Sarah,
I would like to help open the eggs, but Mr. K tells me not to (but sometimes he tries himself). In theory, if a chick can't get out by herself, she probably isn't very vigorous and we don't want her around breeding the next set of eggs. Sometimes Mr. K can't resist giving a chick a little help, but it is hard to do without hurting the chick.
Hens can be funny critters. We also had hens who trod on their eggs or swapped nests.
Because we were showing chooks and looking for show quality birds we had one broody hen who was separate from the other hens when setting. She sat on the everyone's eggs :-) She did a great job but she was nasty and very protective of her broods.
I wouldn't help a chick out of it's egg if it couldn't get out itself. I know that it seems harsh and cruel but I also know that I can think that my care will save this little scrap but 9 times out of 10 I'm just prolonging the inevitable.
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