We tried to hatch another clutch of eggs again this year. We just have not had good results with our incubator. We don't know what the difficulty is. This year we only had 2 survivors.
Ethan built a very nice, sturdy brooder for us that we can use out in the garage. It has been wonderful to not have the smell of the brooder coming into the living room from the porch like last year.
It has a lid with sturdy boards across the top so that the cats can sit on it and observe the chicks and nice, high sides to protect from the winds that blow straight into the garage.
We had 2 orphaned chicks given to us and bought 20 Barred Rock and 20 Buff Orpington chicks from someone on craigslist to keep our 2 hatched chicks company.
It's a grand brooder! It will serve us well and Ethan did such a great job on it!
Several of our hens went broody but only one hen was faithful enough to keep coming back to her nest. The others would forget or get confused and start a new nest somewhere else.
This is Eglantine. She was allowed to keep her nest of eggs because she was so faithful. She even took in a nearby nest that another hen abandoned and rolled each egg over to her own nest and sat on them.
We let the chicks stay with her until they were nicely fluffed up and then we took them and added them to the ones in the brooder. We wanted to let her have them and raise them but a couple died and we decided they might be better off in the brooder. So far she has hatched us about 16 chicks. A much better rate than we got from the incubator!
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