My Chickens

It's a long story really so I will fast forward to the last month. I found a farm from the Backyard Chicken Form (A really cool place if you love chickens) in souther New Jersey that sells fertilized eggs in the variety I desired. I wanted different chickens, ones that would look cool! So we got eggs for Ameraucana chickens - they lay blue/green eggs - Very Cool! Blue Faverolle - they have very fuzzy feet and Cochins who are very gentle and hopefully we got the frizzy ones. Their feathers are all curly like they just came out of a hurricane.

We had 24 eggs because we expected some were not fertile. In the incubator they went - for 21 days we monitored the temperature, the humidity, and candled the eggs to see if anything was cooking inside. We knew a few were duds but we left them inside, just in case.

On hatching day Saturday June 28th 5:30 am- there were a few cracks on the eggs!!! BUT this being my first time I was not expecting a crack to a free bird to take 30 hours!!! Let me just say a watched egg does not hatch! And it's hard not to be excited and not keep checking on them, especially when the egg is shaking, or you can see a little beak peaking out of a hole. So my day was shot!

Of course I missed the first one being born, I checked on them, walked away and the little bugger popped out like three minutes later! 11:30 pm Then it was like 18 hours of watching eggs - so went to bed when most of them hatched. We did catch one - egg #8 on video as seen below. Egg number 9 wasn't going to make it out, so we helped her. She is a preemie, very small - but so far she seems to be holding her own. We are cheering her on and giving her some special attention.

Now we have to hope they are all little girls since we can't keep roosters. But we won't know that for about four months. For now we just get to enjoy them as they grow and do all the funny stuff baby animals do. Stay tuned for updates.