Sunday, September 2, 2012

Baby Chick

What an exciting event...to watch new life be born!  No one can deny it is a miracle!  We have been incubating 6 eggs and we happen to peek in on them when one was pecking its way out of the shell!!  So of course we took the wee one out of the incubator to watch!





It took him over 24 hours to fully come out of the shell.  We put him back in the incubator overnight and when we checked in the morning, he was fully out of his shell.  The kids made a little home for him with a heat lamp, water and chick feed, but sadly...he only lived for 2 hours (sniff, sniff).  It was probably our fault...we handled him way too much.  We didn't help break the shell, but we were moving him in and out of the incubator.  We have learned, not to even touch a baby chick that is hatching until it has been out of the shell for atleast 48 hours.  Hopefully, another egg that is incubating will hatch.

*UPDATE*  No other baby chicks hatched :(  2 were completely rotten (yuck!) and the other 2 had stopped growing for some reason.  Maybe they were left in the cold for too long when we were still allowing the broody hen to sit on them. Oh well...we shall try again next spring/summer!

1 comment:

  1. Awww! Yeah we got to watch one hatch a month or so ago. It was SO neat! Septtro actually did help her out of the shell - which I was VERY against (you know how I feel about intervention - haha!). We later discovered one baby had a messed up leg and moved it to a separate box where she later died. Septtro insists it's not the same baby he "helped" out of the shell. I say it is. :) But guess we'll never really know.

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