Tag Archives: incubator

Impulses

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Different people obey different impulses.  Some shop for shoes (“yes, I’ve got another 50 pairs, but those jade crystal embellished suede spike heeled Jimmy Choos are just so darling … “), some give up boring executive type jobs and decide to build a future career repairing dry-stone walls (this is true: I once did a dry-stone walling course with three of them.  Scary.).  My particular impulse is to fire up our little yellow incubator and put some more eggs in it.  Even if I have poultry coming out of my ears and the last thing I need is more of the little angels.

I don’t even take a straw poll of what comes running when I enter the orchard with a container of corn.  That would be almost sensible, along the lines of:  well, we have enough peacocks (one, more than enough), enough egg laying bantams (I’m running out of egg rich recipes in which to use their largesse and am giving most of their eggs away at the moment), enough non-productive but charming bantams (ie anything that seems to be covered in a mesh of frills instead of feathers) and absolutely no guinea-fowl.

The sad demise of Precious, the guinea fowl, comes in a blog a couple of months back.  I miss her loud African chanting from the top of her favourite apple tree, her hunch backed earnestness as she scampered around the orchard on little fat feet, and her blissfully spotted feathers.  So it would seem sensible, if I have a compulsion to start up the incubator again, to obtain a clutch of guinea-fowl eggs (triangular, spotted, hard as granite) and start to repopulate.

Or how about some quail?  Bonkers, to a man, but the eggs are beautiful and presented in a little plaited straw nest would make a lovely hostess present at supper parties, saving us a fortune in bottles of wine and boxes of chocolates.  Or ducks.  We have no ducks at the moment, and the slugs and snails are rejoicing and partying all night in the flower bed as a result.  Ducks would be great, either Indian Runner (they have a habit of forming into single file, leaning slightly into the wind and patrolling around the garden that I could watch for ever) or call ducks (small, cute and never shut up).

Nah.  I’ve got a friend coming to coffee any moment now bearing has some bantam eggs she found knocking around her hen run that she thought would be pretty.  Probably.  If they are fertile, which they may not be.  She only has 3, so I am padding out the incubator with 9 of our own.  Which means that in 19 days time we will have yet more mixed-race bantams to bring up and release into the hen run to find their place.  And quite honestly (this is the impulse bit) I cannot wait!!

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.