Incubation

It's overcast today and a little chilly after a very warm week. I was sitting here at the computer wondering why the pellet stove hadn't kicked on. (It turns out it's set for 70 and the temp in this room is 71.) I have been outside on the nice days, plucking weeds out of the flower bed by hand again. Elves must have tossed tons of seeds out there, when I finish the dirt is bare and three days later it's green with sprouts again.

One more round of this and I'll resort to using RoundUp. I don't have to worry about it harming the lizards, the feral cats have eaten all the lizards (boo). They've also eaten all the mice, voles and gophers (yay!).

The yard is fun to be in right now, everything is lush and colorful.

The camellias have finished blooming, but the banksia (just behind the chimney) is still gorgeous, and has been joined by scotch broom, other roses, ranunculas, and peonies.

This is a view of the front yard, looking back at the wood shed, where the cats live.

Just this week I was finally able to pet one of the ferals. Chester with the bad leg walked right up to me, looked me in the eye, and rubbed his head on my hand. He let me pet him for a long time, and made a big show of enjoying it. Made my day.

I have been able to let the pigeons out for a while in the afternoons this week. I haven't seen the hawks, maybe they're busy hunting elsewhere to feed their babies. Remember Dragon and his sister that I raised from babies? They're still here.

I have to call the pigeons back into their pen in the early afternoon. That's when the cats venture out and about. The black feral, Angela, has a connoisseur's taste for fine pigeon. Cats aren't as dangerous for the pigeons as hawks because the pigeons can just stay up off the ground. The problem is my pigeons won't stay up off the ground. They like to graze on the lawn and bathe in the sprinklers. I just need to be diligent, though, and I think I can make this work.

I have been mostly been busy hatching chicks. As of today, I have 31 white Old English bantams and 37 Dominique bantams. There are 30 more eggs in the incubator. I haven't decided what to do beyond that.

My incubation procedures are a bit time consuming. Most people hatch a bunch of eggs at once, then brood all the chicks together, and move them outside into a big grow out pen at the same time. There is a lot of culling along the way. Some people cull right out of the hatcher - "Wrong leg color? Off with its head!" Older culls might go to a poultry auction. "Cull," then, can have two different outcomes. This is done so time and money are not wasted raising the subpar birds.

I understand this philosophy. It makes a pretty efficient operation and works well for lots of people. It just doesn't work at my house. First, unless something is suffering I'm not going to kill it. And second, I don't have a good enough eye to look at a small chick and know how it will mature. I'm trying to learn, but there still won't be any chick killing in this house.

I like to go to the shows. My goal is to have maybe 8 birds a year that I can take along. I would be totally happy to buy these birds instead of raise them. I think that would be more cost efficient and a lot less work. I don't need to have my name on a list of Master Breeders, that's a project for youngsters like Katherine and Bob. I'm not the keenest competitor, either. I don't need to win Best of Show every time. But once every couple of years it would be cool to come close. The birds I want to buy either do not exist, however, or they are the ones other breeders want to keep for themselves,

So I'm trying to raise my own show birds. I don't have a place outside where I can maintain an ambient temperature that will allow an incubator to work. I can't keep and handle hundreds of chicks. I don't want to ever have that many. It would be nice to raise maybe 30 a year and get my 8 show birds from that group. I think I may get to that point in a few years, after I've figured things out. But right now my breeding program is still in the experimental stage and I'm having to raise more chicks than I'm comfortable with.

My Dominique bantams, especially, are a mishmash of bloodlines and body types. I cross one male with one female at a time and keep close track of the babies so I can see which specific crosses work the best.

This is my set up. I have a small incubator. I collect and set 8-10 eggs in a batch, every 5 days. It holds a total of 30 eggs.

This incubator was expensive. BUT it's completely digital. It maintains the proper temperature and humidity 24 hours a day with no assistance from me. See that little bottle of water in the background? There is a tube that goes from the bottle into the incubator. If I incubate for 3 months, it won't even use a third of that small bottle. Not that water is an expensive component, but proper humidity can be hard to gauge. Too much and you get chicks stuck in their shells and other messy problems. This incubator prevents things like that. I like it a lot because I hate having hatching problems.

As soon as the first egg pips in the incubator, I move the entire batch that's due that week into a hatcher.

My hatcher is an old foam incubator. My digital incubator can be adjusted to a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit. The foam incubator, with its primitive little knob that you turn, is hard to adjust in less than 5 degree increments. This is what most people start out with, and is the reason why they get so frustrated trying to incubate eggs. Foam incubators are unreliable, and it's difficult to keep the temperature and humidity stable. That's not as crucial for a hatcher. Even so, I have 3 thermometers in it, and I put towels on top if it's running too cool. The cans of pumpkin pie mix are just the right weight to keep the lid firmly sealed. This has worked better for me this year because it's in the same room with the pellet stove, so the ambient temperature stays at 70.

I have a complicated system to keep track of each chick. When I collect the eggs, I mark them with the leg band numbers of the parents. (24 is the daddy, 49 is the mom in this case)

All of this creates a lot of paperwork. People like me love lots of nitpicky paperwork. If you get bored easily, you might skip the next few paragraphs. These are my tools:

At the top are the Sharpie markers I use to put small dots on the top of the chicks' heads. I keep track of this on the large journal page. It lists which eggs are in a batch. I log when each egg hatches, and make notes if there is anything unusual. I use spiral bound index cards, making a separate one for each chick. I'll use that card to follow the bird through its life here, with its show record on the back. In the card file at the top right, I have the cards of the adult birds, grouped by the cage numbers where they live. It's a good way for me to keep track of where they are, because they're moved around a lot during breeding season*. Finally, the small card sitting on top of the journal page is my color key. That's how I know which combination of colors to use for numbered bands and plain bands. The numbered band refers to the male, and the plain band to the female. In the case of full sisters, I use the same color band for quick reference. I know by the number what the specific parentage is.

*Note: The Dom bantams can be moved around, they're amiable. I don't move white Old English much because even the females will fight.

This is a journal page.

This is a chick card.

I started to explain all the stuff on the card, but then realized most of you don't really care about all that. The point is I keep good notes.

The babies go into 10 gallon aquariums heated by a 35 watt bulb, usually with the rest of their hatching batch. I move them to larger quarters every week, but keep the batch together until the chicks are big enough for the first numbered leg bands, which is about 2 weeks for Doms and 4 weeks for white OE.

This is the latest batch of babies, hatched yesterday.

This is one of my oldest babies, hatched March 11.

He and his 8 hatch mates went outside into a big brooder box yesterday. In a couple of weeks, they will go into a regular pen.

The hatching procedure totally takes over the house for at least 2 months. With bantam chicks there is no smell, they have small, hard poops like a parakeet. There is a fine dust from the mash feed, however, and the Doms will kick their shavings all over the place. I keep a shop vac handy. The white OE are very quiet and tidy. They make good house pets. Really. They aren't very chicken-y, they don't mind being in a small cage and they love treats.

One thing I like about having small batches and having them in the house is I can get them accustomed to being fed treats. When they see people they're immediately thinking "food" and not "escape." This helps when they're show birds.

There are probably a few of you who are wondering, "why doesn't she just let the hens hatch the eggs"? Sometimes I'll do that, after the regular hatching season is finished. But all hens are not good mothers. I had slipped 8 extra eggs under a mutt hen that was broody a couple of weeks ago. She was joined by another broody, which was fine. But other hens in the pen kept laying eggs in the same nest every day. So every day I'd have to sort through and pull out the fresh ones. All those hens going in and out managed to crush one egg. Then, about 2 days before the batch was due to hatch, both broody hens abandoned the eggs and moved to another nest. I brought them in and put them in the hatcher. Six of the babies hatched, but it was touch and go for a while.

Hens step on the babies, hens scratch up everything in sight, filling the waterers with mud and debris. Sometimes hens decide they don't like a particular chick, and they kill it.

It's fun to see a happy hen with her babies, but artificial incubation and brooding are more reliable.

I'm still trying to decide what to do about building an area where I can keep single birds in show cages. I won't need it for a couple of months, but it might take me that long to put it together.

Meanwhile, life is very busy. I hope spring is good at your house, too.