I was so excited. One of my bard rock hens went broody and started collecting a clutch of eggs to sit on. Everything was going great. I made sure that she ate and drank every day and she was being a good broody hen.
On Friday night I candled all 8 eggs and all of them had little baby chicks floating around inside the eggs. It was so great! I locked her up tight in her separate little hen house and went to bed happy.
I got up the next morning and walked out to let the hens and roosters out and to check on my broody hen. To my horror, I found her dead outside her little chicken coop. Somehow something had managed to pull a board lose and then finished getting in my chewing a hole in the wood chicken coop. The hole was just large enough for whatever killed her to drag her out of the hen house. Whatever had killed her hadn’t been able to drag her body off though.
I checked the eggs and they were still there but they were cold. The eggs were 13 days old by this time and I was sick that they would probably die. By biggest problem was that I only had a 3 egg incubator so I jumped in my car and drove to Tractor Supply to get a larger incubator. Luckily they had one in stock so I bought it and got home as fast as I could.
I put all 8 eggs in the incubator right away even though it said to let the temperature stabilize for several hours. I figured at this point, what could it hurt. So I sat there literally for almost four hours until I was sure the temperature in the incubator had stabilized.
I figured that I had done all I could do for the moment. I waited twenty four hours and I candled the eggs again to see if I had any chicks left alive. At that point I noticed that one of the eggs was actually chipped. I didn’t hold out much hope for any of them still being alive but to my amazement, they were all still alive!
Now the wait was on to see if all of the baby chicks survived and hatched out ok.
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