Velvet Sparrow posted:

Our annual hatch of baby chickens has begun! Every year we webcast the hatch, then place the camera in the brooder box for the next 8 weeks so you can see and hear 24/7 the chicks live, play and grow up.


We have two bantam eggs, #38 (laid by Olive, a bantam Cochin hen) & 40, pipping two days early! They may or may not hatch today, it's up to them. I'd prefer they wait until the official hatch day of Friday in order to be as healthy as possible. The pips are on the top/front of the eggs, and may not be readily visible, especially as the chicks roll the eggs around. Actual hatch date SHOULD be Friday the 20th and Saturday the 21st, starting at 7AM. I tried something different this year and set eggs so that the hatch would be spread out over a day or so. This is so as many people as possible get a chance to watch an egg hatch. Watch the hatch at the links below, one with chat—keep it PG rated, LOTS of kids (including mine) and teachers & very young kids in classrooms watch the hatch! We have zero tolerance for hate, really bad language (the occassional standard cuss word is OK, ie: ‘Holy poo poo that’s a big chick!’ or ‘drat, what’s taking so long?’ but nothing extreme), racism, etc. and will ban anyone not playing nice and being a decent human being. We try to answer questions both in this thread and in chat:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/chickam2008

Or watch here, full screen, no chat—best for kids:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/chickam2008/pop-out

If you want more Chickam or chicken info, I’ve got a site here:
http://jackshenhouse.com/Chickam.htm


What the Hell is Chickam and where are the girls?!
Sometimes a chick is just a chick. As in years past, we are doing a web broadcast, with sound, of baby chickens hatching. After the hatch the cam will be placed in the brooder box where it will run 24/7 for the next 8 weeks so everyone can watch the chicks as they grow. If we have a hen go ‘broody’—that is, go into ‘mama’ mode—we may recruit one as mama to the chicks. Right now one of the hens is broody, unfortunately she is a small bantam and cannot cover all of the chicks we are expecting, so we can't use her. I'm hoping one of the big fatass girls goes broody so she can handle the chicks. At the end of 8 weeks the chicks will be old enough to be turned out into our existing flock where they will live. We have been talking to the eggs so they will know our voices when they hatch (yes this is weird, but it works).

READ THIS, YOU GOON, YOU, SO I DON’T HAVE TO ANSWER THE SAME QUESTIONS 900 TIMES IN THIS THREAD!
If you already know the routine, just skip the wall o' text.

Why am I just seeing eggs, and what’s with the numbers?

***We are doing two hatches this year, as an experiment I've staggered the hatches a week apart, all of the eggs for both hatches are in the incubator not. So we'll have Hatch A (20 eggs), hatching March 20-21 and then next week have Hatch B (15 eggs), hatching March 27-28.***

With this incubator we can do staggered hatches like this. The cam (and this thread) is started as soon as we see the eggs rocking back and forth, hear the chicks inside peeping or see eggs pipping. This means the hatch is imminent and the chicks are about to start coming out. Once they do, it’s kinda like watching popcorn pop—they tend to start slow, then everything happens at once, and after a while it tapers off. The numbers are so y’all can cheer on your favorite egg. The camera we're using is a Logitech c920. It has a MUCH better picture than the old one, plus the old one had been scratched up and ravaged by baby chicks over the years. So less eye strain, yay!

What’s taking so damned long?!
You’d take a while too if you were a newborn fighting your way out of a damned eggshell using only the tip of your face in cramped quarters. But seriously, here’s the process: The chick rotates into hatching position inside the shell, with it’s head at the large end of the egg. Then it ‘pips’, or pecks an airhole in the shell. Then it rests a bit as air now gets into the shell and helps the chick dry out and the blood vessels that have been keeping the chick alive in the shell ‘draw down’. Then the chicks starts to ‘unzip’ (my own term and not scientific at all) the shell, pecking as it turns in the shell and struggling/kicking/stretching as it goes. THIS TAKES HOURS. It’s a major struggle and exhausting for the chick, which will stop and rest from time to time. Usually anywhere from 20 minutes to overnight, but most are about 2 hours or so. When the chick gets the shell unzipped enough—about 2/3 of the way around—and does come out, it comes out all at once very quickly. There is no rushing the hatch, it takes as long as it takes. NO, I cannot help/poke it with a stick/shake it like a drat maraca. Only in extreme cases where we fear the chick will die otherwise do we ever assist a hatch. It has happened in the past, though.

I thought you weren’t supposed to open the incubator, AAGGGHHH!!
Calm down. This is a new incubator that is different than the tabletop styrofoam ones we used to use. This new one is a ReptiPro 6000, originally manufactured for the reptile hatching trade, but then the poultry folks got ahold of it. It’s basically a tabletop cabinet incubator and is also a mini-frig that can keep your beer cold when it isn’t hatching baby chickens. Because of the way it’s built, in order to have proper ventilation and allow O2 IN and CO2 OUT, you have to open the door. In our case, 5 times a day, which is also when I turn the eggs.

Ugh, they look slimey and hideous! Why are they bashing the other chicks & eggs?
Again, you weren’t exactly the Gerber baby and covered in chocolate and unicorn dreams when you first emerged, either. Rest assured they dry out, rest, get fluffy and cute and perk up after a few hours.

After the chicks dry out, get strong enough to stand and run around, we remove them to the brooder box where they will live for the next 8 weeks. After all the eggs have hatched we place the cam in the box so you can watch them. While still in the incubator, the hatched chicks tend to run around and rather brutally play soccer with the still-hatching eggs. This actually helps stimulate the hatching chicks into coming out, most likely to kick the rear end of whoever was kicking their damned egg. The older chicks will also trample the fresh chicks but they never hurt each other. It all looks pretty rough, though.

Why so few chicks?
Both the hatches this year are a combination of eggs from our hens and eggs that I bought online. It's likely most will be mixed breeds. Here at our home in the northern Nevada High Sierras, we have higher altitude to contend with. We are at 5000 feet above sea level, and with that naturally comes less available O2 and lower air pressure. Plus we have a hideously dry climate. There is also a whole ‘nother thing with sea level chickens (some of ours are still considered such since they were hatched there) laying eggs with larger pores in the shell which makes for more moisture loss, which makes for a crappier hatch rate, yada yada. My research has revealed that it is MUCH harder to hatch eggs under these conditions, haha. That, combined with the fact that you are a HUMAN trying to do the work of a HEN further lowers the success rate. Hens make it look ohsoeasy and no doubt laugh at people trying to hatch eggs. We have the optimal setup we can get without buying a HUGELY expensive professional cabinet-style incubator. The hatch rate will likely be about 20%-60%. I candled the eggs about a week ago and all of the eggs at that time had viable embryos.

Where’s their mama?
We are their mama. No mother hen is necessary, although if any of our hens go broody (go into ‘mama’ mode), in the next day or so we’ll bring her in and see if she’ll accept the chicks (most do accept them, broody hens LOVE chicks and watching a mama with her chicks is freakin’ adorable). Broody hens don’t give a rat’s rear end if those are their eggs or not, all they care about is OMG CHICKS. If a hen isn’t broody she’ll just run away from the chicks, and you can’t force a hen to go broody. If no mama hen, the chicks will bond to us and be much tamer pets.

What happens to the ones that don’t hatch?
There are about 900 things that can go wrong during the incubation and hatch. We keep the incubator running for three days beyond the hatch date to catch any stragglers, after that the unhatched eggs are removed. In order to learn what happened with the unhatched eggs I take them outside and crack them open to see how the chicks developed and look for problems that might explain what went wrong. This is messy and disgusting, yes—but also invaluable and necessary, it helps a LOT for future hatches.

ALSO—sometimes a chick will hatch but won’t live. Sometimes they will die days after hatch after you’ve named them and become attached to them. Mother Nature knows best and some congenital defects are fatal. We do the best we can but losses DO happen.

What kind of chickens are these?
This year we have both bantam and standard size eggs. As they grow we’ll be able to better ID who is what. While we’ll have tiny and large chicks all together and various breeds, they should all get along just fine barring the occassional natural sibling dust-up.

Just like last year, we found that our cold winter had made big fluffy chickens butts REALLY fluffy…and our roos couldn’t…ah…seal the deal with the girls. Bloop the bantam d’Uccle roo didn’t have that problem, the banties not being fluffmonsters.

So just like last year, my daughter and I went out a few weeks ago with a pair of scissors and gave anyone with a big, fluffy hiney a butt haircut. We also shaved away their dignity while we were at it and got major stink eye from all of them. But one week later, viola! The eggs were all testing fertile!

The eggs incubate for 21 days, we turned the eggs by hand 5 times a day. The O and X registration marks are so we can easily tell which ones have been turned. Several times during the incubation cycle I candled the eggs (shined a bright light through them in a darkened room) and removed any that were duds and hadn’t developed. That’s why, if you notice a number missing, there are gaps in the numbers of the eggs left. The remaining eggs you see have chicks inside!

NAMING THE CHICKS!
List yer name choices here now! Nothing my kid can't say without getting her mouth washed out with soap or us called to the principal's office, and no names previously used. As they hatch, our 15 year old daughter will draw names out of a hat for each chick, so everyone’s name gets a fair shot. One name per Goon to keep it fair! You cannot assign a name to a specific egg #, sorry. If you post more than one name we’ll choose one to drop in the hat. I’ll update the egg # below with the name & hatch time.


Hatch A
Along with a variety of eggs from our hens, I also bought this assortment online:


Frizzled Ameraucana/Silkie Hybrid ~ Sizzles (the blue/green ones): ~Hybrid chicks from Frizzled Ameraucana Hens & Silkie Rooster ~
Easter Egger/Silkie Hybrid (also some of the green ones) : ~Hybrid chicks from Easter Egger & Olive Egger Hens & Silkie Rooster ~
Polish/Silkie Hybrid (the white ones on the right): ~Hybrid chicks from Polish Hens Frizzled & Smooth Bearded and Non-Bearded Bantam & Silkie Rooster ~ (unfortunately I don't think any of these eggs developed so I doubt we'll get any Polish mixes)
Salmon Faverolle/Silkie Hybrid: ~Hybrid chicks from Salmon Faverolle Hens & Silkie Rooster ~

Hatch B is all our own eggs.

So we're off! Submit your name suggestions!

Velvet Sparrow posted:

Our annual hatch of baby chickens has begun! Every year we webcast the hatch, then place the camera in the brooder box for the next 8 weeks so you can see and hear 24/7 the chicks live, play and grow up.


We have two bantam eggs, #38 (laid by Olive, a bantam Cochin hen) & 40, pipping two days early! They may or may not hatch today, it's up to them. I'd prefer they wait until the official hatch day of Friday in order to be as healthy as possible. The pips are on the top/front of the eggs, and may not be readily visible, especially as the chicks roll the eggs around. Actual hatch date SHOULD be Friday the 20th and Saturday the 21st, starting at 7AM. I tried something different this year and set eggs so that the hatch would be spread out over a day or so. This is so as many people as possible get a chance to watch an egg hatch. Watch the hatch at the links below, one with chat—keep it PG rated, LOTS of kids (including mine) and teachers & very young kids in classrooms watch the hatch! We have zero tolerance for hate, really bad language (the occassional standard cuss word is OK, ie: ‘Holy poo poo that’s a big chick!’ or ‘drat, what’s taking so long?’ but nothing extreme), racism, etc. and will ban anyone not playing nice and being a decent human being. We try to answer questions both in this thread and in chat:

http://www.ustream.tv/channel/chickam2008

Or watch here, full screen, no chat—best for kids:
http://www.ustream.tv/channel/chickam2008/pop-out

If you want more Chickam or chicken info, I’ve got a site here:
http://jackshenhouse.com/Chickam.htm


What the Hell is Chickam and where are the girls?!
Sometimes a chick is just a chick. As in years past, we are doing a web broadcast, with sound, of baby chickens hatching. After the hatch the cam will be placed in the brooder box where it will run 24/7 for the next 8 weeks so everyone can watch the chicks as they grow. If we have a hen go ‘broody’—that is, go into ‘mama’ mode—we may recruit one as mama to the chicks. Right now one of the hens is broody, unfortunately she is a small bantam and cannot cover all of the chicks we are expecting, so we can't use her. I'm hoping one of the big fatass girls goes broody so she can handle the chicks. At the end of 8 weeks the chicks will be old enough to be turned out into our existing flock where they will live. We have been talking to the eggs so they will know our voices when they hatch (yes this is weird, but it works).

READ THIS, YOU GOON, YOU, SO I DON’T HAVE TO ANSWER THE SAME QUESTIONS 900 TIMES IN THIS THREAD!
If you already know the routine, just skip the wall o' text.

Why am I just seeing eggs, and what’s with the numbers?

***We are doing two hatches this year, as an experiment I've staggered the hatches a week apart, all of the eggs for both hatches are in the incubator not. So we'll have Hatch A (20 eggs), hatching March 20-21 and then next week have Hatch B (15 eggs), hatching March 27-28.***

With this incubator we can do staggered hatches like this. The cam (and this thread) is started as soon as we see the eggs rocking back and forth, hear the chicks inside peeping or see eggs pipping. This means the hatch is imminent and the chicks are about to start coming out. Once they do, it’s kinda like watching popcorn pop—they tend to start slow, then everything happens at once, and after a while it tapers off. The numbers are so y’all can cheer on your favorite egg. The camera we're using is a Logitech c920. It has a MUCH better picture than the old one, plus the old one had been scratched up and ravaged by baby chicks over the years. So less eye strain, yay!

What’s taking so damned long?!
You’d take a while too if you were a newborn fighting your way out of a damned eggshell using only the tip of your face in cramped quarters. But seriously, here’s the process: The chick rotates into hatching position inside the shell, with it’s head at the large end of the egg. Then it ‘pips’, or pecks an airhole in the shell. Then it rests a bit as air now gets into the shell and helps the chick dry out and the blood vessels that have been keeping the chick alive in the shell ‘draw down’. Then the chicks starts to ‘unzip’ (my own term and not scientific at all) the shell, pecking as it turns in the shell and struggling/kicking/stretching as it goes. THIS TAKES HOURS. It’s a major struggle and exhausting for the chick, which will stop and rest from time to time. Usually anywhere from 20 minutes to overnight, but most are about 2 hours or so. When the chick gets the shell unzipped enough—about 2/3 of the way around—and does come out, it comes out all at once very quickly. There is no rushing the hatch, it takes as long as it takes. NO, I cannot help/poke it with a stick/shake it like a drat maraca. Only in extreme cases where we fear the chick will die otherwise do we ever assist a hatch. It has happened in the past, though.

I thought you weren’t supposed to open the incubator, AAGGGHHH!!
Calm down. This is a new incubator that is different than the tabletop styrofoam ones we used to use. This new one is a ReptiPro 6000, originally manufactured for the reptile hatching trade, but then the poultry folks got ahold of it. It’s basically a tabletop cabinet incubator and is also a mini-frig that can keep your beer cold when it isn’t hatching baby chickens. Because of the way it’s built, in order to have proper ventilation and allow O2 IN and CO2 OUT, you have to open the door. In our case, 5 times a day, which is also when I turn the eggs.

Ugh, they look slimey and hideous! Why are they bashing the other chicks & eggs?
Again, you weren’t exactly the Gerber baby and covered in chocolate and unicorn dreams when you first emerged, either. Rest assured they dry out, rest, get fluffy and cute and perk up after a few hours.

After the chicks dry out, get strong enough to stand and run around, we remove them to the brooder box where they will live for the next 8 weeks. After all the eggs have hatched we place the cam in the box so you can watch them. While still in the incubator, the hatched chicks tend to run around and rather brutally play soccer with the still-hatching eggs. This actually helps stimulate the hatching chicks into coming out, most likely to kick the rear end of whoever was kicking their damned egg. The older chicks will also trample the fresh chicks but they never hurt each other. It all looks pretty rough, though.

Why so few chicks?
Both the hatches this year are a combination of eggs from our hens and eggs that I bought online. It's likely most will be mixed breeds. Here at our home in the northern Nevada High Sierras, we have higher altitude to contend with. We are at 5000 feet above sea level, and with that naturally comes less available O2 and lower air pressure. Plus we have a hideously dry climate. There is also a whole ‘nother thing with sea level chickens (some of ours are still considered such since they were hatched there) laying eggs with larger pores in the shell which makes for more moisture loss, which makes for a crappier hatch rate, yada yada. My research has revealed that it is MUCH harder to hatch eggs under these conditions, haha. That, combined with the fact that you are a HUMAN trying to do the work of a HEN further lowers the success rate. Hens make it look ohsoeasy and no doubt laugh at people trying to hatch eggs. We have the optimal setup we can get without buying a HUGELY expensive professional cabinet-style incubator. The hatch rate will likely be about 20%-60%. I candled the eggs about a week ago and all of the eggs at that time had viable embryos.

Where’s their mama?
We are their mama. No mother hen is necessary, although if any of our hens go broody (go into ‘mama’ mode), in the next day or so we’ll bring her in and see if she’ll accept the chicks (most do accept them, broody hens LOVE chicks and watching a mama with her chicks is freakin’ adorable). Broody hens don’t give a rat’s rear end if those are their eggs or not, all they care about is OMG CHICKS. If a hen isn’t broody she’ll just run away from the chicks, and you can’t force a hen to go broody. If no mama hen, the chicks will bond to us and be much tamer pets.

What happens to the ones that don’t hatch?
There are about 900 things that can go wrong during the incubation and hatch. We keep the incubator running for three days beyond the hatch date to catch any stragglers, after that the unhatched eggs are removed. In order to learn what happened with the unhatched eggs I take them outside and crack them open to see how the chicks developed and look for problems that might explain what went wrong. This is messy and disgusting, yes—but also invaluable and necessary, it helps a LOT for future hatches.

ALSO—sometimes a chick will hatch but won’t live. Sometimes they will die days after hatch after you’ve named them and become attached to them. Mother Nature knows best and some congenital defects are fatal. We do the best we can but losses DO happen.

What kind of chickens are these?
This year we have both bantam and standard size eggs. As they grow we’ll be able to better ID who is what. While we’ll have tiny and large chicks all together and various breeds, they should all get along just fine barring the occassional natural sibling dust-up.

Just like last year, we found that our cold winter had made big fluffy chickens butts REALLY fluffy…and our roos couldn’t…ah…seal the deal with the girls. Bloop the bantam d’Uccle roo didn’t have that problem, the banties not being fluffmonsters.

So just like last year, my daughter and I went out a few weeks ago with a pair of scissors and gave anyone with a big, fluffy hiney a butt haircut. We also shaved away their dignity while we were at it and got major stink eye from all of them. But one week later, viola! The eggs were all testing fertile!

The eggs incubate for 21 days, we turned the eggs by hand 5 times a day. The O and X registration marks are so we can easily tell which ones have been turned. Several times during the incubation cycle I candled the eggs (shined a bright light through them in a darkened room) and removed any that were duds and hadn’t developed. That’s why, if you notice a number missing, there are gaps in the numbers of the eggs left. The remaining eggs you see have chicks inside!

NAMING THE CHICKS!
List yer name choices here now! Nothing my kid can't say without getting her mouth washed out with soap or us called to the principal's office, and no names previously used. As they hatch, our 15 year old daughter will draw names out of a hat for each chick, so everyone’s name gets a fair shot. One name per Goon to keep it fair! You cannot assign a name to a specific egg #, sorry. If you post more than one name we’ll choose one to drop in the hat. I’ll update the egg # below with the name & hatch time.


Hatch A
Along with a variety of eggs from our hens, I also bought this assortment online:


Frizzled Ameraucana/Silkie Hybrid ~ Sizzles (the blue/green ones): ~Hybrid chicks from Frizzled Ameraucana Hens & Silkie Rooster ~
Easter Egger/Silkie Hybrid (also some of the green ones) : ~Hybrid chicks from Easter Egger & Olive Egger Hens & Silkie Rooster ~
Polish/Silkie Hybrid (the white ones on the right): ~Hybrid chicks from Polish Hens Frizzled & Smooth Bearded and Non-Bearded Bantam & Silkie Rooster ~ (unfortunately I don't think any of these eggs developed so I doubt we'll get any Polish mixes)
Salmon Faverolle/Silkie Hybrid: ~Hybrid chicks from Salmon Faverolle Hens & Silkie Rooster ~

Hatch B is all our own eggs.

So we're off! Submit your name suggestions!

amusinginquiry posted:

social vegan posted:

name one Hott Keister please and thank u

Zzulu posted:

has anyone tried eating chicken with eggs? Thats kind of a hosed up dish when you think about it

RideTheSpiral posted:

lol

Dreggon posted:

(eggs) benedict

Dreggon posted:

arnold swarzeneggegger

Dreggon posted:

arnold swarzeneggegger