We are so excited to experience the hatching of our eggs that have been incubating in our incubator for 3 weeks!!! Every time anew, it is so amazing and wonderful to see a little chick fighting its way out of the shell into the world! This time, we ordered 2 dozen fertile eggs from a breeder in Oklahoma - theses eggs are from a chicken breed that is pretty rare here in the USA. The chickens are called Appenzeller Spitzhauben and are very different looking, with a feathery top hat and black polka dots on white all over... I will write another blog about our cute Spitzhauben soon...
By chance, one of our laying hens, Welly, became broody again 2 weeks ago. A broody hen will sit on a clutch of eggs and try to hatch it, a trait that has been mostly bred out of modern chicken breeds, because a broody hen will not lay any additional eggs (besides the ones she sits on, and those don't have to be her own, she doesn't care). Chicken reproduction today relies to a very large part on incubator machines, who do the tedious job of "sitting on a clutch of eggs" instead of the mother hen.
But back to Welly: I set Welly up with a few fake eggs in a separate cage to await the hatch day of the eggs in the incubator. Then, as the eggs hatch, I have placed the chicks gently under the hen one by one... Removing all the fake eggs. Any broody hen will only accept chicks for a few days, similar to a normal spread of time it takes for a clutch of eggs to hatch.
It is SO EASY for a chicken momma to tend to her young... they can be raised entirely without a mother, that's how self sufficient they are. They instinctively know how to eat and drink, and are able to run around and explore basically from the end of their first day. You can see two curious chicks less than 24 hours old in our pictures of Welly sitting on her nest.
No comments:
Post a Comment