Sunday, January 27, 2013

Candling Day

Friday night we had candled all of our eggs. Candling means that we took one of the eggs into a dark room, and shined a really bright light into it so we could see what was going on inside the egg. We did this with ALL of the eggs in the incubator. One at a time, with the ducks first. Every time we would put a duck egg up to the light, the little forming duck inside would wiggle around and squirm. It was probably the second most awesome thing I've ever seen in my life, the first being seeing my own kids wiggle and squirm on an ultrasound. DS was there watching as well and he was just so excited to see these little "blobs" moving around inside the eggs. 

We've got just under 2 weeks left before we should have a bunch of tiny animals running around in tubs in the bathroom. I'm really hoping that we can get our new coop built soon because we're running out of roost space in the coop! We sure didn't think out the whole "what if we get more" (also known as Chicken Math) thing well. We're going to build a big 17'x10' coop soon. The coop itself will be 10'x10' and then we will have an area where we will be able to store feed, to put our processing equipment, our chicken/rabbit first aid kit, have a "sick bay", and possibly a brooder box for any eggs we hatch. HOPEFULLY we will get some broody hens and they will do it for us. I'm not holding my breath too much tho. ;-)

We will candle again right before we go into lock down, which is the last 3 days of incubation. By then we should be able to tell for sure which chicken eggs are going to hatch, and which ones we should just take out. We're very excited about out new "fluffy butts," even tho most of them will be for eating. It will be interesting to see what we get, that's for sure!

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