Hola_Zaha
Chirping
Hello everyone,
My wife and I have been visiting this forum for the past 6 months, since we began our journey of incubating and hatching eggs.
We have benefitted tremendously from all the great ideas and vast experience found here.
So, I would just like to share how we are doing now, posting for the first time, hoping that our experience can be helpful to others.
Here are two videos we uploaded on Youtube –
part 1. Incubation & Hatching / Candling Eggs
part 2. 100 Days Progress (day by day)
Just a few points on our experience, which are captured in the videos:
- We got 4 fertilized eggs and hatched 3. Unfortunately, 1 stopped growing on Day 12ish (veins started to disappear and the embryo stopped growing).
- We live in eSwatini (Swaziland), Africa on a private game reserve (where there are no big carnivores). The climate was hot the first months, although at night it still got quite chilly.
- We used a 40W light bulb as the heating source, both during incubation and when they were chicks, before they grew feathers. When we had power outages, which happens frequently, we put glass bottles of hot water covered with thick socks.
- We keep them in the house after sunset, so we opted to develop a “mobile” coop. As the chickens grew, we had to go from a “box house with a little yard” to a medium coop and later to a larger coop. We also made a mobile fence with cardboard boxes and set a fenced area outside during the day, until, of course, the fence became irrelevant as the chicken started jumping over it.
- The current coop, while quite large (Approx. 2.5m X 1.2m X 1.2m) is made from PVC pipes(It's not perfect as we couldn't find the right joints here, but it still works
), so it is not heavy and is mobile, and as you can see in the video, I can carry it and set it anywhere. At sunset, we bring it back inside the house and the chickens spend the night inside.
- In eSwatini, it is hard to get high quality chicken food and snacks, so we try to catch them grasshoppers everyday.
- The chickens are scared of the warthogs here, but they seem to be ok getting cozy with the Nyalas (Type of antelopes of Southern and Eastern Africa).
Once again, this would not have been possible without the insights from this forum, so thanks a lot!
My wife and I have been visiting this forum for the past 6 months, since we began our journey of incubating and hatching eggs.
We have benefitted tremendously from all the great ideas and vast experience found here.
So, I would just like to share how we are doing now, posting for the first time, hoping that our experience can be helpful to others.
Here are two videos we uploaded on Youtube –
part 1. Incubation & Hatching / Candling Eggs
part 2. 100 Days Progress (day by day)
Just a few points on our experience, which are captured in the videos:
- We got 4 fertilized eggs and hatched 3. Unfortunately, 1 stopped growing on Day 12ish (veins started to disappear and the embryo stopped growing).
- We live in eSwatini (Swaziland), Africa on a private game reserve (where there are no big carnivores). The climate was hot the first months, although at night it still got quite chilly.
- We used a 40W light bulb as the heating source, both during incubation and when they were chicks, before they grew feathers. When we had power outages, which happens frequently, we put glass bottles of hot water covered with thick socks.
- We keep them in the house after sunset, so we opted to develop a “mobile” coop. As the chickens grew, we had to go from a “box house with a little yard” to a medium coop and later to a larger coop. We also made a mobile fence with cardboard boxes and set a fenced area outside during the day, until, of course, the fence became irrelevant as the chicken started jumping over it.
- The current coop, while quite large (Approx. 2.5m X 1.2m X 1.2m) is made from PVC pipes(It's not perfect as we couldn't find the right joints here, but it still works
), so it is not heavy and is mobile, and as you can see in the video, I can carry it and set it anywhere. At sunset, we bring it back inside the house and the chickens spend the night inside. - In eSwatini, it is hard to get high quality chicken food and snacks, so we try to catch them grasshoppers everyday.
- The chickens are scared of the warthogs here, but they seem to be ok getting cozy with the Nyalas (Type of antelopes of Southern and Eastern Africa).
Once again, this would not have been possible without the insights from this forum, so thanks a lot!
