I don’t know which was
more astonishing, the 100% hatch rate (if you don’t count the yolkers)
or the fact that this little guy popped out of his shell in perfect
shape…40 hours after his last compatriot was already in the
brooder. In fact, I had meant to autopsy the sole remaining egg
and clean the brooder before the last chick hatched, but I got busy
enjoying the first beautiful weekend of the year and forgot about
it. Which turns out to be a good thing since this chick was
apparently just a late bloomer and was quite willing to take on the
world.
I
headed to Permaculture
Chicken: Incubation Handbook‘s “Causes of
incubation-related problems” to see why my percent
viability was so low when my hatch rate was so high. (Yes, I
do refer back to my own books — that’s why I write them.) With
the added data-point that the yolkers were all from our oldest hens,
especially the cuckoo marans, I concluded that the fault probably lies
in our rooster preferring younger women. Sounds like I should
probably choose eggs from our younger hens for our second hatch of the
year.
winning streak with 100% survivability by treating our chicks to clean water from day 1.
This is our first year trying to incubate our eggs from our laying flock. I read in your Permaculture Chicken Incubation book that you can match the egg with the hen it came from by shape and size. But how do you get familiar with those characteristics for each hen’s egg? We have 9 hens, and there is variations to the shapes and sizes of the eggs, but I wouldn’t know which hen to match to which egg.
Kevin
Kevin — I get a feel for this slowly over time. Whenever I go into the coop and catch a hen in the act of laying an egg, I look and see what the egg looks like and who the hen is. It helps if you’ve got several different breeds — our Marans lay the darkest eggs, followed by the Australorps, then the Rhode Island Red eggs are palest.
If you really, really want to know, you can make a trap nest (described in Harvey Ussery’s The Small-Scale Poultry Flock). You’ll have to be around to let the hen out of the nest throughout the day, but will definitely see who lays what.
I hope that helps!