Too young for mommy-hood

A few weeks ago one of the chickens disappeared.  No sign of feathers or anything.  A couple weeks ago we got rid of our last rooster because he kept chasing people.  Sometime between last night and today another chicken went missing (thanks to the son not propping the coop door open and the birds all getting locked out at night, during a storm until I found them after 10PM.

So I went looking.  I was determined to find evidence of where this one went.  I finally saw something, and from a distance she looked like a bloated dead bird.  I thought maybe she got hit by a car and this was her body on the side of the road, wet from the storms that keep coming through.

I was scared to even touch her, well really I was grossed out.  I was scared she'd be cold and dead and gross.  But her eyes were open, not blinking, for a solid two minutes and I thought a bird wouldn't die with it's eyes open, would it?  I finally reached down and poked her and she turned and started attacking my hand.  So I reached down with both hands to pick her up.

These were all of the eggs under her!  I handed her off to the boy and gathered the eggs.  She'd been sitting on these eggs through the storms!  All but two were warm, although I'm not sure if any are fertile since we got rid of the rooster.  She was not happy but we moved everything into the coop.  They're all the same color so I suspect she's been laying in this spot, by the road for awhile now and then decided, during the storms, it was time to sit and become a mom.

I didn't expect that

We knew that the guinea were laying eggs somewhere, but we hadn't stumbled upon the nest yet.

Then the oldest told me that he saw the nest by the big tree.  A few hours later when I was going outside to check on the chickens I heard a guinea go crazy across the yard and an orange stray tabby cat came from the area the guinea was trying to hurry away from.

Upon closer inspection I found this.

I learned something new

Apparently I've been candling wrong.  Tonight, we candled a few more eggs to see how things were going after after a couple eggs, I decided to try the light coming from a different angle.  

It was amazing.  We could see a mass and movement in nearly every egg!  I was squealing like a little kid!

Of the 14 eggs that are in the incubator, we saw signs of life in all but three of them.  One of them was completely stuck in the egg turned and I was scared to break it by pulling it free and two of them were almost see through.

I decided to run out to the coop to check on the eggs under the hen and I snapped pictures of those eggs.  Four of the six showed signs of life.

This is a bad egg

This is amazing!  It was so cool to see them moving inside the shells!  Now I feel like I need to do a lot of research on what I need to do to keep them alive until hatching.

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Still on Day One

When I woke up this morning I checked the incubator and it was only at 80 degrees and 80% humidity.  I got some of the water out and turned the heat up before running off to the gym.  When I came home an hour later the temperature was finally almost right!  99 degrees and 60% humidity meant I just needed to bring the humidity down.

But then I looked at the second thermometer that was inside the incubator.  It was well over 100 degrees!  The humidty gauge was obviously broken on this one, but which thermometer was right?!

When you want to hatch special eggs

I have promised myself several times that I would not get more birds unless they were purebred birds. I did a little research and thinking and decided that having chicks now, in the winter, would be a good idea because when they are ready to start laying in 6 months, it will be spring. The problem is that our eggs are "barnyard mixes" and local breeders have let their birds all roam together for the winter and so their eggs aren't pure bred either.

Someone recommended that I buy some on Ebay, and that is how I found myself in a bidding war for various chicken eggs tonight. I haven't been on ebay in at least 8 years!

We won 6 (or more) New Hampshire eggs from a German bloodline.  These were two of the pictures that the sellers had posted.

And we won 11 (or more) Silver Laced Wynadotte eggs from the Foley bloodline.  These were the pictures they had posted.

I can only hope that they all arrive in one piece, that I am smart enough to handle them carefully, and that between the broody hen and the incubator that we have a good hatch rate.  If we can get just half of them to survive that would be about 9 chickens, and so maybe 4 hens to add to the flock.  

I'm also planning to pick up some other chicks from a local seller next weekend.  

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Tucking the girls in

One of our youngest girls has decided to go broody.  Every night for almost a week, I have found her in a nest box on the eggs from that day.  I keep taking them from her because we need eggs to eat, but she won't budge.  The last few days there haven't been very many eggs and I'm wondering if she's scared the girls off.

I think this was only confirmed tonight when I found an egg on the ground in the coop.