New Chickens on the Way

Spring fever has struck again and it's time for baby chickens to appear.  Last year I bought an incubator because none of my chickens went broody, so I wasn't going to get more chickens unless I hatched them myself.  Then I did something silly - I counted my chickens before they hatched, and ate the rooster before I was sure that I had a replacement.  So here I am with an incubator and no fertile eggs for hatching this spring.  Lucky for me, I know a person that has chickens and a rooster, so I traded him my non-fertile eggs for some of his fertilized ones.  I was going to borrow his rooster, but that would have been stressful on him and my flock, so I just opted to get some of his eggs.  This has two benefits: I will have new genes to add to my flock so I can have a better breeding program, and I hope to get enough chickens this year so that we can eat some of them.  Now before you go judging me for killing my chickens and eating them, please keep in mind that our chickens are not pets and they live the life that battery chickens can only dream of.  Also their deaths are as fast and painless as we can possibly make them.  I actually feel it is better to know that the chicken I am eating led a happy life that ended quickly and respectfully rather than to wonder if it spent a miserable few months in a crowded warehouse only to be carted off in a scary truck to wait in line to be killed in a smelly, filthy place it had never seen before.  But I digress......

So I set up the incubator in the corner of the kitchen where it was last year and made up a sheet where I could record the number of days they are to be set for, and when I flipped them. Eggs need to be turned two or three times a day in order to develop correctly.  Each egg is marked with an X on one side and an O on the other so I can keep track of which eggs have been flipped.  Chickens only take three weeks to hatch and the most exciting part happens each night when I "candle" the eggs to see how they are progressing.  It is amazing to see them develop from a tiny speck of an embryo to a wet chirping hatchling in just a matter of weeks.