Go Silkies Go!

As you all know I do enjoy our chickens. We have a mixed laying flock made up the of typical large fowl breeds you pick up at the local feed store. Also, we have a trio of Cuckoo Marans that are production stock which we hatched from shipped eggs last year.

This year we are trying something completely new for us. Emma has joined the poultry group of her 4H club. The leader has recommended that the kids show bantams because the smaller birds are easier for small hands to handle. We love silkies so it was easy to pick which bantam chicken breed we wanted to go with. But I wasn't having any luck finding some nice ones locally.

It's still a little chilly to ship chicks or young birds so I started looking for silkie hatching eggs. Of course I went hunting on the web for eggs and found Josh's Bantams, a breeder of lovely blue and splash bearded silkies. We purchased 16 silkie hatchings eggs.
Josh packaged the eggs wonderfully but one egg was cracked. No matter how carefully packaged, the postal service can be very hard on eggs. Even if eggs are not obviously cracked they can be exposed to extreme temperatures or just handled roughly.

We placed the 15 undamaged eggs into our Hovabator 1588. I candled the eggs at day 7 of the incubation. Three were developing but the other ones had nothing growing in them. All a testimony of just how rough their trip in the mail had been.
There's my three little silkie eggs in the incubator. Though I wished that the other eggs had fared better, I'm just as excited for these little guys as ever. If all continues to go well, they should hatch on 2/13. I'll keep you all posted!