A busy weekend of baby chickens!

Hatching eggs is a beautiful experience. 

I previously wrote about our little breeding program to expand our chicken egg color palette, well on Friday another important step was taken, we successfully hatched 3 bright blue egg layers. The hatching rate wasn’t great. Only 3 out of 9 eggs hatched. Usually 60% can be expected. Ugh. It appears that a few of the eggs we received from the breeder in FL weren’t fertilized, which is really annoying considering the cost, but at least we got 3. And they’re sooo cute!

Blue Egg Layers

2 of these chicks are Cream Crested Legbars and the other is a Whiting True Blue. The Cream Crested Legbars are a purebred, rare breed of blue egg layer. While the Whiting True Blue was bred by Dr. Tom Whiting, a poultry geneticist, they’re a relatively new breed, but they consistently lay a blue egg and that’s all that matters.  Don’t ask me which chick is which though. It’ll be a few weeks until I can answer with confidence.  But I can tell you that the Cream Crested Legbars have awesome hair!

But back to the hatching…about 7 hours after the first chick hatched we realized that one of the babies was struggling to escape to freedom. We learned from previous hatchings that not helping can lead to curled toes, vitamin deficiencies and death. (Remember the story about our rooster, Jerry) However, we’ve read that helping can cause development issues and even death, this is all based on the idea that people might force a chick out of the egg to early.

This was not the case, so we decided to go ahead and open the egg. Carefully, with tweezers, patience and a warm, wet cloth to try to moisten shell and internal membrane. (The internal membrane that lines the inside of the egg, which you may have noticed when peeling a hard-boiled egg, dries out from the exposure to the air after the chick breaks the shell), so this little guy didn’t stand much of a chance without our help.

Check out the chick rescue video on Instagram @ArchiesAcres

It was a wonderful moment when we realized that we saved this sweet little baby. S/he was very weak from the rough start but has since made a full recovery. Here’s a pic from right after the “delivery.” The video of the rescue is on our Instagram feed as well.

We’re happy to report that all 3 chicks are doing well!

In the next day or so we have another incubator filled with 6 eggs that will (hopefully) be hatching. Stay Tuned for that!