Hatching some eggs

With all of this time on my hands, I wanted to figure out something farming related to do.  For some reason, I decided I wanted to try to incubate some eggs.  I had never in my life hatched something from an egg, and I thought it would be awesome to do!  

So I started looking at incubators.  Holy hell, they were expensive.  For one of the little shitty ones that hold 3 eggs, it was at least $50.  And one of the downfalls to not working is not having a whole lot of money to spend on things like incubators...  So I found some youtube videos that showed me how to make an incubator out of a styrofoam cooler - like the ones that Omaha Steaks are shipped in.  By buying a light socket, water heater thermostat, computer fan, thermometer/hygrometer, and extension cord, it was possible to make your own incubator. 

So of course I dragged my crafty husband Jason into all of this.  Who else would be able to wire everything correctly, etc.?  I wish I were handy enough to do it all myself, but that just isn't me.  I'm improving at that stuff, but am still a work in progress.

I'm pretty sure I had the first set of eggs ordered on eBay before we even started on the incubator.  Because a sense of urgency always makes a project go more quickly - sort of moves it up to the top of the list of to-do's (for Jason).  I'm not sure how it happened, but I ended up winning 3 egg auctions on eBay over the next few days.  Now, 6 white wyandotte eggs, 15 welsummer eggs, and 6 olive egger eggs were headed my way and I didn't have a functioning incubator for them.

That weekend, Jason and I worked feverishly on building incubators.  We made the first one out of an old styrofoam cooler and the 2nd one out of Norman's (our sulcata tortoise) old wooden cage.  The 2nd one had a divider down the middle, so it could hold 2 separate batches of eggs.  Now the garage looked like a freakin' hatchery (or a meth lab - I'm pretty sure that's what the neighbors were thinking anyway).  I'm sure I looked completely crazy going out into the garage every hour adjusting the thermostats, trying to get the temperature and humidity exactly right in all 3 of the incubators!

So for 3 weeks, I relentlessly micromanaged the incubator conditions and turned the eggs at least 3 times per day.  And when it came time for the first eggs (the white wyandottes) to hatch on Wednesday, nothing happened.  Nothing.  I got very discouraged.  All of this work and no chicks!  So what did I do?  I got on craigslist and found a lady in Newnan that was selling some English orpingtons, so I took a trip there and came home with 6 fluffy butts (4 chocolate/buff mix orpingtons and 2 blue orpingtons).  Maybe these would take my mind off the eggs.

Meanwhile, out at the farm, tiny little bird eggs were hatching.  There was a wren in our upstairs chicken coop.  She built her next behind our big black cock painting.  It was really awesome because I could pick up the painting and get a spectacular view of the babies.  Here's a couple of pics of it.

Here they are right before they flew off 2 weeks later.







On Friday, the first 2 Wyandottes hatched out.  One ended up being crippled - had a bad leg (we ended up naming her Brenda).  The other one was just fine.  Here they are right after they hatched.

I was ecstatic!  Then the others started to hatch out.  At one point we had 17 chicks - the 6 I bought, 7 welsummers, 3 Wyandottes, and 1 olive egger.

Then my beloved cat Zelda murdered 1 of the Wyandottes and 2 of the welsummers in the garage a couple of days after they hatched.  It was awful.  I was so mad at that heifer.  But I got over it.  Here is that crazy murderer.

You can imagine how quickly all of those chickens grew out of the plastic storage bin brooder in the garage, so they moved out to the farm pretty quickly.  I think they were about 3 weeks old.  They did just fine.  I think out of all of them, there are only 4 hens that I'm sure of.  It sure is hard to grow egg layers around here.  They all seem to turn out to be cocks!

Well, we were over at our friends Scott and Brenda's house - they live on the lake in our neighborhood - and they had these 2 mallard ducks that were hanging around their dock.  So they would feed them bread, and they kind of just hung out.  I got the brilliant idea to get some more ducks and put them at their house.  So that's exactly what I did.  I found some Ancova ducks in Powder Springs, on craigslist of course.  I think we kept them for 2 weeks at the farm and they just drank too much water, so we brought them over to Scott and Brenda's house and they seem to be doing fine.

Here are some pics of the menagerie of chickens and ducks out at the farm.

  

Here is Ezra hanging out in the yard at the house with Brenda and her companion.

When I moved the last of the chickens out to the farm, I guess I got empty nest syndrome.  So I got back on eBay and ordered a whole slew of eggs again.  This time, I have 12 guinea eggs that started incubating last Thursday, 7 "rare breed mix", then 12 more "rare breed mix" (5 of the eggs were broken when I got the first shipment so they shipped me another dozen), then today I just received 15 more guinea eggs and 7 cochin orpington eggs that I will start incubating tomorrow.  Now that is a lot of poultry!  

To be honest, I have no idea what I'm going to do with all of these birds.  There is usually about a 50% hatch rate on shipped eggs, so I might end up with about 30 birds around the first week of August.  We shall see.  I've never had guineas, so that should be interesting.  I might end up selling some on craigslist to recoup (haha pun realized but not originally intended) a little of the money I've spent on all of these eggs.  Jason has offered to help build another coop, so hopefully we can do that to make some more room as well.  Those guineas are going to need their own palace :)