Background information
I’m about to become a chick parent
by Patrick Vogt
Our egg hatching mission: let’s get down to business
23.6.2023
Translation: Patrik Stainbrook
Our home breeding experiment is heading into the home stretch. Preparations for this decisive phase will begin soon. And you can be there live when the chicks hatch.
A lot has happened since the beginning of our mission to hatch chicken eggs. We’re doing everything we can to ensure that our chicks will actually hatch in the end. Central in this regard is first and foremost the incubator, which does almost all the work for us.
Life comes, life goes
By now, we’ve shined light through the eggs a second time, marking nine of them. With these, we’re almost certain that a chick is actually growing inside.
Source: Patrick Vogt
Among the 14 remaining eggs are several that we can’t for the life of us properly screen. Their shell is too dark or thick. And then there are the eggs in which nothing seems to happen. In some cases, they also lack the other typical signs of life, fine blood veins that run through the egg like a spider web, for example.
Nevertheless, I still leave all 23 eggs in the incubator. I’m too scared of accidentally binning an egg from which a chick could possibly hatch after all. I’ll wait until the very last moment to remove «dead» eggs from the incubator. Call me a coward all you like, I say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
What’s important before hatching
Since the fourth day of incubation, the machine has been turning the eggs at regular intervals. Time for a change. On day 18 – Saturday already – we’ll prepare the eggs for hatching.
Then we’ll turn off the torque and remove the turning device. Instead, the eggs will be placed on a non-slip surface in the incubator. In addition, we’ll increase the humidity significantly, from the current 50 to about 70 per cent. This will soften the eggshells, making it easier for the chicks to hatch.
Once we’ve done all this and set the incubator accordingly, it’ll remain closed in any case until hatching. Otherwise, the humidity could drop. We’ll be left to anxiously wait and hope that our first breeding attempt at home will have a good ending.
Source: Tenor/Angry Birds
Want to follow the final hours of our hatching experiment and watch as the chicks break through? Then follow my profile. Starting Sunday, 25 June, I’ll be livestreaming.
Header image: Patrick Vogt
I'm a full-blooded dad and husband, part-time nerd and chicken farmer, cat tamer and animal lover. I would like to know everything and yet I know nothing. I know even less, but I learn something new every day. What I am good at is dealing with words, spoken and written. And I get to prove that here.
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