Babies, Babies, Babies!

Ameraucanas, Barnevelders, and 2 Late Bloomers

 I'm working on taming the wild bunch from the feed store.  Blue/green egg laying chickens are known for being very precocious chicks and they sure are!

 I've been feeding them mashed hard boiled egg from my hand for about a week and they all come running when my open hand is in the brooder.  Now, catching them to clean their pen.... that's a different story. They run like crazy birds!

 Charlotte is helping me with Operation Tame The Crazies.

 I had to move the Feed Store Gang to a brooder with taller sides (on the left) because they were starting to jump out of the baby pool.

I think they like their new space. 

Autumn and DC shared brood of 8 chicks

The babies being raised outside are doing very well.  The moms take them around the yard, showing them all of the tasty things to eat... bugs, mulberries, seeds, etc.  The rest of the flock keep a respectful distance and the moms make sure of that.  DC is the more watchful hen, always ready to sit down so the babies can warm up and nap under her wings.  Autumn is the more adventurous mom and likes to take the babies to new scratching ground.

Mavis - Not Cut Out For Motherhood

 Mavis, the Silver Spangled Hamburg on the right in this picture, sat her her clutch of 10 eggs diligently over the past 3 weeks.  She would aggressively protect her nest and I had to wear gloves to check on her eggs.

Unfortunately, once the chicks started to hatch on Friday, she panicked, attacked some eggs, and abandon the nest with one baby already out of it's egg.  Luckily I found the nest and the chick quickly and warmed the still damp chick and scrambled to figure out a way to keep the other eggs in a warm, humid environment so they would have a chance of hatching.

I had a microwaveable hot pad that I warmed and put in a basket lined with a very damp kitchen towel. I then covered the whole basket in another very damp towel and put it under a heat lamp.

 This little chick needed some help out of the egg and I wasn't sure it would make it. I crossed my fingers and left the basket and single chick under the heat lamp overnight.

 This is the little chick that hatched outside by itself. I kept it warm in my shirt for hours and it got pretty attached to me.

 I put one of the other chicks in with him overnight so he wouldn't be lonely.  When I would put my hand in the box, she'd climb onto my hand and go to sleep.

 Look at what I woke up to the next morning! My make-shift incubator worked! The yellow chick is the one that had trouble hatching. He/she's all fluffed up and doing just fine! I took the dry chicks out of the basket, rewet the towels, and covered it again hoping the last eggs would hatch.

 All but one of the eggs hatched... which I was amazed by.  Here are our nine little chicks that Mavis was supposed to raise.  Only one is a Hamburg cross. (the little white one with black stripes on it's back)

They're a really sweet group of chicks.

The Incubator Gang

 On day 18 of incubation, I got the incubator ready for "lockdown" (the last few days you don't move the eggs and you raise the humidity level in preparation for hatching).  I used clear produce containers to divide the eggs so I would know which chick was hatched from which color egg.

 The chicks started hatching yesterday and it was amazing how fast those containers filled with chicks!

 They quickly got crowded and I saw signs of stress from them so I quickly pulled out the dry chicks and the egg shells, put them into baskets according to egg shell color, and put them under the heat lamp while I put their leg bands on (to keep track of egg color).

 Identified and dry, the new chicks joined Mavis's crew under the heat lamp.

 They were very sleepy. It's hard work hatching out of an egg.

 This is one of the Barred Rock X's from my mom's flock.