Hatching chicks, sustainability, and ingenuity

There is nothing more agonizing than watching a chick hatch. You just want to reach over there and rip open the shell so the little bird can be free. But lots of sources tell you not to do this. Some say that the struggle is vital in building the chick's muscles, and if you "help," the chicks won't survive. But if you watch closely, it's obvious that at some point, the chick exhausts itself to death. I've learned over the years not to watch the process too closely. Most chicks take hours and hours to hatch -- anywhere from four to twelve hours or more.

Part of our drive towards sustainability includes hatching our own meat birds and replacement layers. The chicks hatching now should be mostly New Hampshire reds with a barred rock cross here and there. After all we have about forty NH hens and three roosters. We only have six barred rock hens and one barred rock cross rooster. However, when I look at the nine black chicks and eight red chicks, it makes me think that barred rock rooster has been pretty busy.

If you think the inside of our incubator looks a lot like the inside of a refrigerator, that would be because it is an old refrigerator. We had an under-the-counter refrigerator that kept croaking, so after having it fixed three times, I suggested that Mike turn it into an incubator. After all, it is a big insulated box, right? He's an electrical engineering professor, so he understands thermostats. He put a light and a fan inside the frig to create heat and circulate it, and he made a thermostat that turns the light on and off to keep it between 99.5 and 100.5 degrees Fahrenheit.

It looks like we have a lot of eggs that are not hatching, but I think that has to do with egg husbandry, rather than electronics. We collected the eggs and then couldn't find our old Styrofoam incubator, so the eggs sat and sat for about a week while Mike repurposed the frig to make a new incubator. I didn't think they would hatch, because if you are holding eggs to put into an incubator, they should be turned regularly, but they were pretty much left to sit in one position the whole time.

Next up -- turkey poults! We've only collected about eight turkey eggs so far, but we'll hopefully find another dozen or so and get them started in the incubator by this weekend. They take 28 days to hatch (compared to 21 for chickens), so I'll give you an update in a month.