Our First Attempt at Hatching Chicks

Last month, as we prepared for a number of farm tours, Gavin and I looked around the farm and decided we needed to offer something extra for our guests. Being winter, the gardens are not looking as full as usual. Plus, we wanted to make our farm tours a real experience. We always wanted to try our hand at hatching our own chicks and thought this would be a fun thing for people to see when they come to visit. Having hens in different breeds means we can have eggs of different colours too. (I’m all about the pretty). So, after agreeing to give raising chicks a try, we went on the hunt for the equipment and some fertilised eggs. Here’s what happened.

The Breed

Because it is winter the number and breed of fertilised eggs for sale was limited. We want to build up our flock of Belgian D’Uccles so we enquired on one website and we were put on a waitlist. It was as I scrolled through the website that I found cute French Wheaten Marans. We decided to order a dozen and see how we went.

French Wheaten Maran chickens are heritage dual-purpose chickens grown for both meat and eggs. They’re considered something of a ‘gourmet’ breed because they lay beautiful dark chocolatey brown eggs. They are a hardy breed with a docile temperament that loves to forage and free-range. These traits appealed to us because all our birds are forage in the paddock during the day and it can be quite cold here.

The hens are pretty. They have feathering up the outside of their legs so they’ll complement our D’Uccles.  As you can see in the image above, they will make a lovely addition to our flock.

The Marans originates from a town called Marans, in France.  One fact I learned is that a single bird is not called a Maran. The name is Marans whether singular or plural, sort of like fish and fish.

What We Did First

Our first purchase, while we waited for the eggs to arrive in the mail, was an incubator. I chose this cheaper brand from Crazy Sales that had good reviews. I didn’t want to waste money if this activity turned out to be a huge failure. The incubator turns the eggs automatically and keeps a constant humidity level. The instructions were rudimentary, but we found a YouTube video that explained how to use it correctly so we could get a good hatch rate.

We also purchased a plastic tub, a heat lamp, a water container, a feed station, chick starter, and some pine shavings. We used these to build our own brooder for after the chicks hatch.

The Process of Hatching Chicks

When you find out about the actual process of getting chicks to hatch it does make you wonder how birds ever do it. I can certainly see why our ducks cannot be bothered! After taking delivery of the fertilised eggs we had to let them sit at room temperature for 48 hours with the pointy end of the egg facing down. A hen will keep her eggs lying sideways, and that’s the way smaller incubators do it. If the more rounded end faces down for too long there’s a danger that the air cell will become dislodged and the developing embryo will die.

We then placed them sideways in the incubator and it was sort of set and forget after that. Gavin added 100ml of water to the incubator each morning to keep the humidity and temperature constant. We did this for 18 days.

After day 18, the eggs were getting ready to hatch so we upped the humidity level. Thank heavens for that YouTube video. All we had to do was put soaked sponges in the corners to add more water, take out the tray so the eggs would stop turning, and wait three days. There was no way we would have known that from any of the instructions we had. We were basically in the dark

The Result of Hatching Chicks

Hatching chicks was not that hard. We ended up with a 50% hatch rate which is apparently good in winter, so I was told. We also looked up how to sex the chicks and from looking at their wing shape, we think we have four hens and two roosters. I’m happy with that. Last time we let the hens hatch eggs we got six roosters and two hens! I can’t wait to see what our chicks look like when they are grown.