Our Chickens: Baby Chicks (Photos and :09 video)

Back in May we decided we needed more eggs so we incubated the eggs we gathered over a couple of days and put them in our small incubator. It typically holds 9 chicken eggs, we put in 6. In three weeks we heard our first peeps! Surely not all would survive, but all 6 did. After hatching 6 eggs, we thought we needed more so we incubated 6 more eggs! Three weeks later...6 chicks! We eventually lost one chick from each clutch(one from the dogs and one just didn't make it). We ended with 10 baby chicks total to add to our 5 adult hens and 2 adult roosters.

Here are photos of the babies! Their daddy rooster is a Leghorn and the mommies are all Easter Eggers.

We made a few mistakes when hatching these eggs. First of all, we opened the incubator...about every 3 days....to candle the eggs again to make sure thing were coming along properly. We also made a mistake in taking the eggs from the incubator a they were hatching. Don't do this. Our chicks still made it, but they may have not enjoyed what we did. We did do the right thing in keeping the chicks under a heat lamp until they were old enough to take their cage outside for a couple of hours a day. When the first hatching was old enough, we moved them to an outside cage. The temperatures during the summer are more than warm enough to keep these guys alive. That was just in time for the younger chicks to hatch and move into our indoor cage with the heat lamp.

Now the chicks are close to 4 months old. I'll post more about them in a future post.

Thanks for looking! Please don't judge us for not doing our research properly to begin with. We learned so much with these two first broods that we won't be repeating those mistakes again. Thanks again! Stay tuned!