The Silkie Saga

Probably "saga" is being a little too melodramatic but it was a bittersweet experience. The sweet part is that we ended up with two beautiful silkie babies from the three eggs that did develop. Bless their little pointed heads. :)

The bitter part was that my first little pipper that I blogged about in my previous post died. He zipped around the egg successfully and just stopped moving. (That's his egg in the foreground) We tapped on the incubator after a few minutes and he still did not move. I took the egg out and he was dead. Perfectly formed with no defects visible to the eye so I'm guessing he died from exhaustion going 40 hours from pip to zip.

The two other chicks hatched with no problems and are doing well. Hopefully I'll be setting more eggs very soon. Yes, it can be a bit of an emotional roller coaster but that's just how it is when you take on the challenge of raising anything: chickens, children or tomatoes they all make me want to cry at some point. ;) But the rewards far outweigh the tears!

A Pip! Now Just Waiting For the Zip.

One of our dear little silkie eggs that I blogged about last week has pipped. We came home from Emma's 4H meeting and I noticed a wee little, almost discernible crack in one of the eggs. That is what's known as a "pip".

Before we went to bed last night we were lucky enough to see the chick make the pip a bit larger while we watched. Now we are waiting on the "zip" which is when the chick pecks away the shell in a circle around the egg. The zip starts at the pip. Chicks will usually pip and rest for up to 24 hours before they start to work on the zip.

Nothing to report on the other two eggs as of yet. Hopefully this little early bird will inspire the other two to get cracking. I'll keep you all posted.:)

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!