baby chicks hatching-1602

The baby chick above is a Blue Silkie Bantam – and will look like this when she grows up:

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photo from My Pet Chicken

Beware of cuteness overload in this video!

Baby Chick Hatching

 

Chicken Hatching Equipment

This Spring’s chicks include:

We get our hatching eggs from My Pet Chicken. It takes 21 days of incubation to hatch chickens, so plan ahead!

The best home incubators are from Brinsea. Both of these have automatic egg turning and temperature control. We have both of these.

For up to 7 eggs: the Brinsea Mini Advanced Incubator. There’s a cheaper version, but I like this one because it is fully digital. At a glance, you can monitor humidity, temperature and a countdown of days til hatching time. It also includes automatic turning and cooling cycle.

The Brinsea Octagon 20 ADVANCE digital egg incubator is what you saw in the video – this one can hatch up to 24 chicken eggs. Like the smaller version above, this one is fully digital and includes egg turning.

Another must is a candler! The kids will love seeing the baby chick grow inside the egg. With a candler, you can see very clearly what is going on inside, from heartbeats to movements and chirping. I like this Brinsea Ovascope Egg Viewer because it includes an LED light, mirrors and a rotating base. For best viewing, the egg is placed inside the candler and then covered to keep it dark so that the LED can shine right through. In the old days, they used a candle – holding up an egg to a candle to view inside.

That’s all you need for hatching the eggs – but once they hatch, you’ll need a place to put them, a heat lamp, pine shavings, food and water. I’ll write more about our set up in another post!