Our First Three Egg Day!

Our Flock:

Today we had our first three egg day. All three girls are laying now! Sylvia and Penelope laid early this morning, before 10am and Victoria laid after noon. I'm still in shock. I never thought it would ever happen since it usually takes up to 25 hours for an egg to form. It's pretty exciting and I think I'm going to do some baking with them, since we have quite an accumulation. Over 10 eggs stockpiled since Friday morning.

The New Clutch:

I added more water today into the incubator since it was almost out. I guess I let it go too long with out checking, it's only been a couple of days though. It's very difficult to see the water well through the automatic turner. We candled the eggs today with a homemade candler. We made a cone with dark paper and left a 1" hole at one end and stuck our maglight flashlight in the other end. I put the eggs up to the end of the cone with the 1" hole and counted 10 out of the eighteen eggs fertilized and growing embryos. Which is more then I expected because some of the eggs are so tiny. We were only expecting the 12 eggs so we have more chickens then we expected. One of the eggs looks as if the embryo is sticking to the side of the egg shell so we'll most likely lose that one. Good site to check out for embryonic development is:

http://lancaster.unl.edu/4h/Embryology/EmbryoPhotos.htm

It's totally amazing that a fully formed chick starts to pip out after only 21 days. If you think about it, they're pretty evolved for such a short period of time. We bid and won on ebay on a different kind of coop to house the Bantams in. Like the eglu it has an attached run and the whole thing is enclosed and covered by a solid roof. The coop is also off the ground to protect against predators and from draft. There is a ramp that the chickens can walk up and down into the coop. My husband just wanted to combine all the chickens together, but this is a big no no. Salmon Favorelles are very docile so they tend to be picked on (literally) by other breeds and they're are a Bantam breed so they're about half the size of our other chickens. We want to keep every body healthy and happy.

We have a 40 gallon tank that we will put the chicks in as a brooder and when they've grown out of it, we will use a cardboard barrier (which can be found on McMurray Hatcheries website). We're waiting for the omelt people to start importing their large coop and run the "cube". It houses about 10 birds. It's pretty sweet and colorful! Go check it out at www.omlet.uk

This is where we should be now: