New Life

I am still amazed at how much I like it in the country, everything has changed so quickly and I still can't believe how much I enjoy all the chickens, ducks, and geese.  

The ducklings started hatching a few days early, I half expected them to as hot as it was when they were shipped.  We had a mishap and I was afraid that we might have accidentally killed them in the shells.  We had a beautiful day and my husband opened up all the windows and turned off the air conditioning.  Neither of us even thought about how it might affect the eggs.  It got really warm in the house while we worked outside, which is not a good thing when your incubator was set up to run when the temperature is 78.  The house only got up to 84 degrees on the Inside, however we also had a brooder with chicks in the same bathroom that the incubator is in...with a heat lamp on it.  With the additional heat of the heat lamp and the house...the incubator temperature got up tp 105 degrees!  

I was horrified to find the temperature was that high, I figured all the ducks and chickens would be fried in the shell.  We got lucky with the ducks, we ended up with 10 out of 14 viable eggs hatching.  I had to help a few out of the shells, after one died after zipping...I didn't want any more to die.  I had three eggs that at one point had live ducks in them...I candled all of the duck eggs looking for movement after the heat incident all of them were alive, so we actually lost 4, I just didn't open the eggs...I candled them again, and even though I saw no movement any more, I left them to incubate several more days.

Today one of the chicks hatched, I put about a dozen chicken eggs in the incubator a few days after our rooster died.  I tried to select only our Rhode Island Red hens eggs.  I believe the first chick to hatch is a Rhode Island Red.  A new life to replace the one lost.  I have more eggs pipping, just no others have hatched yet.  I also have a hen sitting on a lot of eggs, Brown Racer is a very broody girl...I hope that she passes that trait on to her offspring.  We shall see how many of these eggs that could be damaged end up hatching.  If nothing else hopefully Brown Racer will have a successful hatch.

Since our Rouen's started laying eggs, I collected a dozen of them and put them into the incubator.  In about a week I will candle those eggs and see if they were fertile, if they are we will have more ducks in about 28 days.  Ducks grow very rapidly so they should be about the size of an adult at about 5 weeks, they should do pretty well in the duck pen provided I get the new shelter built for them before cold weather hits.  All of them should be old enough to start laying come spring.  I have my doubts about the eggs I hatched being full blooded Khaki Campbell ducks...and I ended up with two of the eggs labeled HY hatching out yellow chicks.  I contacted the lady from eBay that I got them from and they are a hybrid called Golden 300, if I remember right.  She claims they are even better layers than Khaki Campbell's...and sometimes lay two eggs a day!