Tag Archives: hatching

A hatching observed

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I think of our incubator as a ‘miracle tube’ and right now, as I write, it is performing another little miracle.  You may remember that when we came back from Morocco I filled it with 12 bantam eggs, probably because it was raining and I needed something optimistic to do.  Now their time has come and I’m finding it hard to tear myself away.  Honestly, it’s far better than watching TV.

The incubator is a yellow plastic tube, big enough for 12 bantam eggs, 8 hen or guinea fowl eggs and about 6 big goose or peacock eggs, and it has hatched all of these in the past (you may remember my mixed emotions when Duffy came into our lives).  When you feel like adding more players to the crowd scene in the hen run, you warm it up to the correct temperature, top up the water reservoirs, add the eggs, turn it three times a day and wait for results.  Two days before D day you stop turning it, so that the chicks aren’t dizzy when they come out.

First sign of imminent hatching is that an egg says PEEP! which is always exciting.  It continues to peep regularly as the chick inside gets down to business.  First a little hole appears in the side of the egg, through which you can see a tiny beak chipping away busily.  Then if the chick is strong, it saws around its shell as efficiently and neatly as if it had a tiny chain-saw tucked away inside, and flops out.  At first it is like a soggy cottonwool ball, which the astonished expression of most new-borns.  A few hours later, Sog Ball will have dried out into Perfect Easter Chick, pottering around on its tiny toes, and will be ready to make the move into the little run I keep for new chicks which has an infra-red lamp and special food and water bowls.

Of the 12 eggs I put in 19 days ago, 10 are fertile (nice one Pavlova), and it looks as if 6 will hatch out, which is fine by me. To date we have two Perfect Easter Chicks ambling about under their infra-red light, two Sog Balls collapsed limply against the other eggs, and two eggs saying PEEP!  I’ll keep you posted.

By the way, Lupin, Foxy and their four lambs are out in the meadow and lovin’ it.  Duffy has grown more blue feathers and attacked the oil delivery man (his oil tank, his rules), and the baby robins are now a nest full of enormous golden beaks.  Have a great Bank Holiday Weekend, I’ve taken a photo of Foxy and her little lambs which I’ll ask Mikey to put on the blog.  They are very sweet and incredibly friendly.

Wenceslas is a dad!

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A great day for Wenceslas (and for Fluffy) (and for me, I love hatching days!)  Fluffy the broody hen was a round ball of white feathers with a growl in the middle when I went to lift her off her single egg this morning.  Usually she likes a snack and a brush up first thing before going back to maternal duties but not today.  I had a quick look at Egg, which was peeping loud comments from inside its shell.  Then I went back a little later and there was a large hole in the side of the egg, with a tiny beak drilling away contentedly inside, occasionally pausing to shout encouragement to Fluffy.  I left them to it for a couple of hours and when I went back the egg shell looked as if it had been sawn all the way around with a very small chain saw and a soggy yellow chick with a couple of black spots was sitting in the nest, wondering what had happened.

Fluffy is thrilled, she doesn’t mind that her family is a small one.  She’s making all the right noises, and this afternoon I’ll move her and Chick into the little run I keep for yummy mummies.  And give them chick crumbs and a little boiled rice for Fluffy (she adores it) and generally get them set up.  It’s meant to rain later on, so I’ll try and get them out while the sun shines because it’s lovely to see a chick having its very first sunbathe.

Wenceslas is now a father, and this will probably be his only offspring.  Pavlova has taken over the girls, who adore him and cluster around him while he tells them how lucky they are to have such a spectacular cockerel as their special men.  Wenceslas doesn’t get a look in, but quite honestly he prefers not to bother with all that romance stuff anyway.  He’s worked out life as a happy bachelor, and it includes a great many dust baths and quiet eating of the best bits of food he can find, without telling anybody else about it.  The hens now look on him as Just a Nice Friend and Pavlova is surprisingly relaxed about having another guy on the block.

But now Wenceslas has passed his genes down a generation.  And I’m hoping it will be a girl chick and that she will have the same outrageous hairstyle as Dad.  As soon as it is fluffed up enough to be photogenic I’ll take a photo and ask Mikey to put it on the blog while I’m away.  I can’t name it until I know whether we’re talking blue bootees or pink bootees.  But either way it’s a cute chick, and we are delighted (and in Wenceslas’ case, surprised).

We need to talk about Duffy #1

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Duffy the peacock is a strange and beautiful bird, and he has a strange and beautiful story.   I’ll give it to you in short bursts, so that nobody gets peacock-fatigue.

The beginning: I never meant to have a peacock, and if I’d known then what I know now I would have run screaming away when Eric the grave digger appeared on the doorstep early one morning holding 6 large white eggs and asked if he could have a lend of my hincubator.  We’ve got a little incubator, which has produced many happy chicks, so I went and fetched it.  Eric looked at it in horror and said it seemed a bit gadgety to he, and could I do the necessary and bring him the chicks when they were out.  He’s a dear old man, and I love hatching chicks, so I agreed.  I thought that they were goose eggs, set the incubator up in the kitchen and waited for the patter of little rubber gosling feet.  But when the eggs hatched, instead of the fuzzy goslings I’d been expecting, out stepped stripey chicks with large, intelligent eyes and punk rock hairstyles.  They were peachicks!  Only 5 hatched out, so I put them in a hay-lined box and handed them over to Eric, who accepted them delightedly but looked shifty when I asked where the eggs came from.  As he is a gardener at various local statelies, I should think he trousered them as a perk.  I went home thoughtfully and examined the remaining egg.  It seemed lifeless, with no chips in its shell, but when I held it against my ear I could hear a faint ‘peep’.  I’ve never been able to resist helping out weak chicks, as several of my current batch of hens could thankfully tell you.  So although every poultry book ever written says ‘don’t do it!’ I carefully started to chip off the shell.  It was a long and delicate process, but eventually I managed to extract a floppy, pure yellow (unlike the others, all of whom were stripey) peachick with badly crippled legs.  And this is why he’s called McDuff, shortened to Duffy – it’s a mangled quotation from Shakespeare: ‘McDuff was from his mother’s egg untimely ripped’.   So there I was with a very sickly peachick – to be continued.