Author: Anna & Mark

I’ve been reading about how
important old, wise matriarchs are to elephant herds.  (Bear with me here
— this really is relevant to chickens.)  If you’re an elephant,
you scoff at lone female lions, but male lions are half again as
big.  While it would take about seven lionesses to kill a
full-size elephant, two male lions could do the same job and it’s
conceivable that a single male lion could take down an elephant in a
pinch.



Until recently, humans
couldn’t tell the difference between the roar of a male and female
lion, but modern digital magic has shown us what the oldest elephant
matriarchs knew all along — the sounds are subtly different. 
Scientists played recordings of roars from male lions or female lions
to various herds of elephants, some of which had old matriarchs and
others of which had younger matriarchs.  Only herds led by
elephants who had reached or surpassed their sixtieth year reacted more
to the higher danger male lion roar than to the lower danger female
lion roar.  Perhaps the younger elephants couldn’t tell the
difference, or just hadn’t been around long enough to discover how
potent a single male lion can be.  Other studies have shown that
herds of elephants led by an older matriarch are better able to survive
droughts and to avoid bee stings.



Reading about the
importance of these old elephants got me wondering about whether we
should keep our oldest hens in the flock even though their egg
production has slowed down.  I have high hopes that by this fall,
some of our homegrown chicks will be overflowing our egg basket. 
At the same time our then nearly six-year-old hens will be molting and
settling in for a long winter of eating me out of house and home. 
I had originally planned to whittle down the flock to delete these old
sit-abouts, but when I watch our chickens on pasture, I can tell that
the oldest hens have a lot more foraging tricks up their sleeves than
the youngsters do.  Mark threw a crawdad into the pasture the
other day, and one of the old girls tore into the tasty treat while the
younger hens looked on with confusion.



I think there’s a happy
middle ground between the most efficient chicken-keepers who kill hens
as soon as they reach three years old and the least efficient
chicken-keepers who let their coop turn into an old chickens’ rest
home.  Perhaps maintaining at least two matriarchs should be part
of my strategy for building the best foraging chicken flock?

With our wildly varying
spring temperatures, it took a week for me to figure out how to adjust
the nearby heater to keep our incubator running on an even keel. 
The low temperature alarm went off on the first night and the high
temperature alarm went off on the third afternoon and the ninth
night.  I’m sure these temperature variations will affect my hatch
rate, but I’m actually quite pleased with the combination of the Brinsea
Mini Advance Incubator‘s
high-tech temperature control and our
supplemental space heater — there was much less
temperature variation than I’ve ever managed before!  I’ll count
this first try a success if we get even one living chick.



With
that goal in mind, it’s finally time to prepare for the hatch. 
Except for keeping the temperature even, my only job during the first
two and half weeks of incubation was to keep one of the wells inside
the incubator full of water — it tended to need refilling every three
days.  On day 19, I filled both wells with water so that the
humidity inside the incubator would rise from 40-50% to 65% or
more.  It’s essential to have high humidity during hatch time so
that the chicks won’t get stuck in the shell and die.  I left the
pot guard on all along, but now’s also the time when you need to put
that small insert in place to keep chicks from drowning.



The automatic egg turner
feature on the incubator keeps track of days to hatch and stops turning
at day 19 (which will read as day 2 on the count-down window.) 
When the eggs stop turning, it’s best to remove the egg disc insert and
put a piece of paper on the floor of the incubator underneath the eggs
instead.  (Be sure to cut a circle out of the center to fit around
the water well.)  Paper on the floor of the incubator gives your
chicks easier footing and also makes the incubator much easier to
clean.



When you stop turning
the eggs at day 18, each chick will be manipulating its location in the
egg so that its head can
point toward the air pocket at the blunt end of the egg.  By day
19, the chick will have poked its beak into the air pocket and will be
starting to breath air, and soon thereafter you might be able to hear
the chick peeping in the shell.  The chick can now start pecking
its way out of the shell (pipping), which it may do any time between
day 19 and day 22.  This period is toughest since you’ll get best
results if you leave the incubator completely closed between day 19 and
the time when all of the chicks are hatched and fully fluffed
out.  I’m looking forward to the challenge!