Yesterday afternoon we saw the first signs that the chicks were trying to hatch. By last night, one little guy finally broke through his shell, much to our delight. This morning Amelia joyfully announced to me that we had two chicks hatched! All day more of them have gotten free of their shells, but just as many more only have a tiny hole poked through. So far we are at a count of seven babies. Everyone wants to hold them, including me.

We are so eager to see how many babies we’ll have and how many won’t make it. But at least I know now that I did something right. I’m a good hen!

Now that the chicks are peeping and hopping around, our cat, Indigo, has discovered not only a warm place to nap, but a great source of entertainment between snoozes. When I see her, I can’t help but think of the phrase from the Bible, “…keeping watch over their flocks by night.”

Actually, the chicks have more to fear from our children than they do from the cat. The children bump into the incubator, they lift the lid when they think I’m not looking, and several times Judah has been in the study unsupervised. Fortunately the biggest mischief Judah has gotten into so far has been to turn the lamp next to the incubator on and off over and over. I’m sure if we ignore him long enough he’ll work on removing the lid.

9 pm update:

We now have nine chicks hatched, and there are about seven more eggs that seem to have chicks actively trying to get out. Tonight I went and bought some wood chips for the cardboard box we’ll prepare for them tomorrow. I have a heat lamp, a chick feeder and a chick waterer from years ago when we had chicks out in the country. I’m not really sure why I’ve saved them all these years, but I sure was glad to have them last Spring when we had chicks again. I feel so very “official” to have a real chick feeder and waterer. Everyone is anxious to get the chicks out of the incubator and into the nest box. It will be much easier to watch them and hold them once we don’t have to worry about them being so delicate.

9 pm Friday update:

The final count of hatched chicks is 15. Being the curious, scientifically-minded person that I am, I cracked open the eggs that did not hatch to see if I could figure out at what point in the incubation they had died. Interestingly, only one of them was completely undeveloped. The rest had made it all the way to hatching time. Two of them had even pipped a hole in their shell but then had died before getting all the way out. The most interesting of all was a chick that was deformed. It had two beaks and three or four eyes on it’s sort of funny-shaped head. It only had one body and one pair of legs, but the head was obviously almost double. Very, very odd.

Anyway, back to the world of the living and the cute and fluffy! We moved the chicks into a nest box with cedar chips, a water bottle and food. They are so cute and so curious. All of us are very interested in them. I’ll be sure to post some photos soon.