It's alive! It's alive! It's alive! Muhahahaha!

Okay, maybe I'm a little carried away. Really, though, you have to admit this is pretty cool. On day 6, one of our little eggs is definitely, positively alive!!! I was so worried yesterday that our little experiment was at an end but now I know that at least one of my little guys is still going strong. And here's the proof:

Houston, we have movement!

After a serious temperature fluctuation last night, I was not feeling hopeful. I've still been turning the eggs but I was pretty sure I'd blown it. I decided to candle them just now to see what I could see and . . . there's definite veining and MOVEMENT in egg #3.

That's right! Movement!!! I'm way, way too excited. :-) I'll take a picture later and post it.

Choosing an incubator for your fertile eggs

When your main criteria is cost--in that you don't want to spend more than $20--your incubator options narrow pretty quickly. In fact, you're left with only two choices: to buy a Chick-bator, pictured below, or to build your own.

Well, I decided that while the materials might be cheap, the time to gather and assemble them (and the shear will required to finish any project lately) would be better spent on building the coop we'll (hopefully) need in 6-8 weeks. I also had a coupon, which may have been the determining factor. :-)

According to the people at PoultryHelp.com I've made a horrible mistake. Not my first one, to be sure, but I'm still a little worried. After polling the nice folks hanging out on the boards at BackYardChickens.com, though, I think we do still have a fighting chance.

While I do think I should invest in a hygrometer to measure the humidity (and it looks like Home Depot has one for $2.98, which is within my budget), it seems like we have all of the components for success. Our setup may need a little more attention than an expensive incubator but I'm enjoying checking on the little darlings. Since I should be able to work from home almost every day for the next three weeks, I don't think we're quite doomed (yet).

UPDATE: I was actually able to find a free hygrometer on freecycle. It's only a couple of miles away--even closer than Home Depot--so I'm saving $2.98 plus tax as well as a little bit of gas. ;-) Just goes to show that you really don't have to spend a bundle to have fresh, organic food. A huge amount of effort, yes, but a lot of money, no.

Hatching eggs require . . .

What do fertile hatching eggs require to, well, hatch? Not too much, it turns out. They need to be kept at an even temperature so I put a little thermometer on top of the eggs and adjusted a 7 watt lightbulb with a small square of aluminum foil. They need a little humidity so I filled one of the legs of the incubator with water. And they need to be turned. At least three times a day. Really, that doesn't seem like such a huge commitment.

It turns out, though, that turning a hatching egg is a little more complicated than I originally thought. For starters, you have to mark the top and bottom of the eggs so that you're turning it as close to 180 degrees as you can each time.

When turning a fertile egg in the incubator, you also have to make sure to always keep the "big" end of the egg tilted up. That's fine as long as you can tell which end of the egg is "big." On one of my eggs it isn't so obvious. I've pretty much guessed, so we'll keep our fingers crossed for that little guy.

Besides determining the proper tilt, though, the hard part seems to be just scheduling the turns themselves. Today we were out for 12 hours at a special event. I turned the eggs this morning at 6am but didn't get the chance to turn them again until 7pm. It's important to turn them an odd number of times each day so that they don't spend consecutive nights on the same side, so I'll stay up as late as I can (probably around 10pm) and turn them again. Hope I don't end up with little lopsided chicks. :-)

Fertile eggs? Check! Incubator? Check!

The pieces are finally all in place. Last night I assembled our Chick-bator Incubator and set it up to monitor the temperature. After much fiddling and rearranging, I finally got it to a steady 100 degrees. This morning our three potential chicks arrived:

Now we're ready for the pieces to all come together. I very carefully marked the top and bottom of each egg and numbered them. (I'm open to giving them names.) I put them in the incubator--which is inside a kitchen cabinet to protect it from drafts--at cats. It happens to be the cabinet in which I keep the dog treats, so hopefully my little organic chicks won't develop a subconscious desire for beef jerky. :-)

And here they are in all of their glory. This will be the eggs' home for the next 21 days . . .