Earlier this summer, my husband gifted me a bunch of fertile eggs and asked me to incubate them. I have an old incubator and got it set up. An incubator needs to be set up a day before you put the eggs in so you can get the humidity levels right and get it up to temperature.
I have a thermometer inside the incubator and can adjust the temperature up and down by spinning a little handle on the top on the incubator. Once everything is just right in the incubator, I marked my fresh, fertile eggs with an X on one side and an O on the other in pencil. Ink might contaminate the eggs so we don’t use ink. I placed the eggs in the incubator, all showing the same symbol.
Every hour or two, I would open the box up and turn all the eggs. I would roll them forward for X’s an backwards for O’s. This is because eggs have something like tendons that hold the yolks in place. If you roll your eggs in only one direction, the tendons eventually break and the eggs are no longer viable.
If this seems like a lot of extra work to you, well, it is! I rolled the eggs about eleven times a day and twice at night around 2 and 5 am. Something, possibly a Great Chicken Spirit, kept waking me up at night and this took a heavy toll on my sense of humour. I was very happy to enter the lock-down phase on day 18. The eggs must be left in position for the next three day as the babies will get into the correct position for delivery and get ready to break out.
Even before the chicks hatch, they begin to peep. Once the first one hatches, the other babies get the idea and come soon after. They chip their way out of their shells with a special egg tooth and slice off the top of the shell and kick their way out. The hot breeze of the forced-air incubator dries them out and I ended up with 17 beautiful, golden, fluffy chicks.
The eggs came from our flock of Buff Orpington chickens. These are lovely, old-fashioned golden birds that are dual purpose. That means they are good egg layers and also a good roasting bird. They are big chickens and heavily feathered thanks to some ancestors of the Cochin variety of chickens.
Unfortunately, the Buff Orpingtons used to be great moms but a failure to breed for good mothering and an over reliance on artificial incubation means they now have the mothering instincts of a brick. Which is why I got stuck doing their job for them. I am considering getting a couple of Cochin hens as they still make great mothers. Both the Buff Orpington and the Cochin breed of chickens are currently endangered.
As they are rare birds, they sell for a lot of money. I could have bought some fresh chicks from Rochester hatchery in Alberta for $15 a chick. My 17 chicks would have set us back $255 plus the environmental cost of shipping the tiny fellows by air. It really is easier on the chicks to hatch them yourself and spare them the trauma of being shipped.
Once the chicks were nice and dry, we put them in a 3′ by 4′ box with a heat lamp, food and water. We feed them unmedicated chick crumble and a daily treat of a hard-boiled and mashed duck egg and a bowl of finely chopped dandelion greens. The little guys are doing very well and will replace the oldest hens in the flock later this year.
We know which year our hens were hatched as each year has a differently-coloured leg band. The new little hens I just reared will be ready to lay next spring and should lay quite well for three years. After that, they make excellent stewing hens. Grocery store chickens have no real flavour as they are obscenely young and trying to stew them results in something like a pot of glue.
About half the new birds will be cockerels and we will raise them for roasting. This means they will get the best of food, especially a lot of garden greens. This is one of the reasons I cultivate dandelions as they are a super food for chickens.
Chicken fat should be a bright-orange colour and if it is white, that means the bird you are eating is unhealthy from a disgusting and inadequate diet. The meat of such birds is not much good to anyone as are commercially-produced eggs.
The yolk of a good egg should be orange, even veering towards red. Some friends of ours say when they break one of our eggs in a pan that the sun is shining. The pale, yellow yolks of other eggs shows you they have almost no nutritional value. This is why we tend to make egg salad the long way. It is simply the better way.
