My Guest Bedroom Is Cheeping

I had a hen go broody last month and I bought a few hatching eggs to stick under her so she wouldn't just be sitting on a bunch of rotten eggs for three weeks. The lady I bought from sent me way too many to put under the hen, so I gave my little black araucana eight of the eggs and put the other 23 in one of my incubators.

The ones under the hen probably hatched sometime around Tuesday. I don't know for sure because apparently something small enough to squeeze into a very small gap under the bottom of the pen (and too small to bother the two adult hens) and ate all of the chicks. I go out to feed them one evening and the hen is still sitting on the eggs. I go out the next evening and the eggs are all cracked open (except the unfertilized one BACH had laid during that time) with no sign of chicks. Kind of sucks, but the hen didn't seem to care too much. She was up and wandering around for the first time in a month like she hadn't a care in the world. Hens actually make awesome mothers, but they apparently don't hold too much stock in mourning. Good on them.

Back to those 23 eggs in the incubator, they started hatching today. The first one had already pipped this morning when I got up, so I expected to come home to find five or six soggy chicks stumbling around the incubator floor and more struggling to free themselves from their porcelain prisons. Instead I find that first chick to have only made slight progress over the previous eight hours and only one other egg showing any signs of having pipped. The really funny part was that the one that had just pipped this afternoon was out and flopping around the incubator floor a full hour before the little guy who got in the first punch. I guess the early bird gets to be the big wuss.

Now there is a duet of cheeps emanating from my guest bedroom. I really hope a few more of the chicks hatch tomorrow. Otherwise I'm going to end up with just two chicks, which is totally lame. About as lame as the stupid chick who could make it out first despite the eight-hour head start. They'll probably both be roosters.

Pictures of the little fuzzballs tomorrow when they dry off and learn to walk.