The last chick for this hatch is finally out. Four chicks hatched very late. I had a total of 63 hatch. 2 failed to thrive, 5 are at their new home. That leaves 56!
I'm going to try to get a video of a chick actually hatching. This video failed at that, but the chicks bobbing around in the background made me laugh.
My fertility test is looking good! I set 102 eggs and pulled infertiles yesterday. There are 83 eggs left in there, but 10 of the eggs I pulled were from my retirement pen, which has all old birds, so not a surprise. My scarlets had the next worst fertility. Only two each pulled from my...
I'm having so much fun watching this single chick with the old hen. I opened the brooder to make sure the heat lamp was working (It's turned off a couple times), and the hen stood up, walked a bit, then shook her wings and the chick fell out.
The one egg that turned out to be fertile of the 41 that I set is quite late hatching. It should have hatched on Sunday. Yesterday there was an internal pip, though, and this morning there's an external pip.
I need to go find an older hen to bring inside and see how she does with the chick...
If you can, dim the lights gradually. If you don't have multiple light sources where you're keeping them turn off one by one, you can try turning off the lights where they are but have a light on in the next room so they have dim light, then turn that light of after half an hour or so. That...