Last hatch for 2012 (maybe)

After our wildly successful blue laced red wyandotte hatch, I had another teacher ask me if I'd do a hatch for her class.  I thought that sounded like a fine idea, so I set eggs around 4pm on Tuesday, May 8. I'd given my lavender ameraucana cockerel in trade for hatching eggs.  I got three coronation sussex, one silver sussex, one olive egg, one ameraucana, and one brown egg (parentage is unsure, I grabbed it out of the eating eggs basket after declaring another ameraucana egg to be not good for hatching).

This hatch just hasn't gone very well. In fact, I'd say that it's been my worst ever.

At 10 days in, I had to throw out two of the coronation sussex and one of the silver sussex. I never was able to candle the olive egg; it was way too dark inside. At lockdown, I had to throw out the ameraucana egg, it appeared to have quit at 2 weeks along.

At 8am on Tuesday (so 8 hours shy of day 21), the brown egg (Shirley) and the olive egg (Emily) had both pipped.


At 2pm, all three were pipped, and the coronation sussex seemed to be doing the best.

At 4pm (start of day 21), I went to set up the hatching cam, and I felt uneasy about the coronation sussex. I can normally see movement in the egg or chirping. And if I don't, I can tap the incubator and that wakes them up. I didn't see anything like that with the coronation sussex.

At 5:30pm, the brown egg hatched. The chick looks an awful lot like a marans, but the legs are clean and the wrong color. Shirley pushed the other two eggs off camera so we couldn't see what was happening, and then stretched out for the camera. May have to rename her Diva.

I went to bed at 11pm, and nothing had changed.

At 6am, I checked, and it appears Emily has hatched, and it appears to be a yellow chick. Wow!!