Hatching eggs have arrived at the lakeside cottage!
With great joy we opened our post box to find a box of hatching eggs from a heritage breeder in Northern BC. These are marked with letters indicating the breeds we’d carefully researched: Lavender Orpingtons, Bielefelders, and Red Blue-Laced Wyandottes. We welcomed still more fertile eggs, hand delivered from our friend who rented us the incubator, almost a dozen blue-green Auracanas. We’re hatching so many! Though not all for us.
Thirty-one eggs settled overnight like this, point down, in a cool spot, to allow the air bubble to rise to the top where the growing chick will need it.
On May Day we set them into the egg-turner, then set the turner into the warm, humid, waiting incubator that hums in our bathroom at a steady 37 degrees C. Now they all tip to the left a little, and later when you visit you’ll see them all leaning together to the right, seeking to emulate the cosy nest and the intelligence of a mother hen turning her eggs, to keep the growing chick moving easily inside the shell. All our dreams of keeping chickens, all our conversations and research about how to keep them, are extraordinarily real now. We’ve studied hard – but now it is time to learn by doing.
Twenty-one days will bring us to hatching time – come back and see our preparations and the ideas behind them in the days ahead.
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