And the total is...

... ten chicks!

I turned off the incubator today and put it away. There were a total of 11 chicks that hatched, 7 Swedish Flower Hens and 4 Wheaten Marans. One of the Marans didn't make it. Another one had pipped and half un-zipped but then stopped. After giving it a long time we decided to "help" it out. Yes... I know you aren't supposed to help them out of the shell, but it would have died otherwise. It very well may die yet, it's hard to say. It's not as strong as the other chicks but doing alright. It was shrink wrapped within the egg's membrane and just couldn't move around enough to work himself out of the egg. Only time will tell.

I don't have great pictures of all the chicks yet, just ones I took quickly on my cell phone. I'll take better ones soon. If you're a facebook friend you may have already seen these.

First the Swedish Flower Hens

And now the Wheaten Marans, only two pictures as they all look the same anyway!

Notice the feathered feet on them.

We also took a drive to pick up a few started chicks this weekend. I'll post more on those soon.

For now here's a picture of Emily with the Buff Laced Polish she picked out!

Fuzzy butts and peeps!

They have started hatching!!

So far we have 6 total, 3 each of the Swedish Flower Hen and Wheaten Marans.

Here's a picture of one of the Marans eggs un-zipping.

Some of them make quick work of it, others take awhile. It's lots of work to get yourself out of an egg you've called home for 21 days!

Once they make it out they aren't the cute fluff balls you'd expect quite yet. They take some time to dry off and pouf up. Looks like a bad hair day!

The new incubator doesn't have a lot of room for the chicks once they hatch so we have been scooping them out quickly and moving them to the old incubator that I have set up just to keep them warm and dry off. Otherwise they keep moving around on top of all the other eggs knocking them around.

Here they are warm and drying off.

The light colored chick front and center is a Wheaten Marans. If you look closely you can see it has feathered legs! The strip of wet sponge is in there to help keep the humidity high. I'll move them out to the brooder later today. The heat lamp is all set up and their water and feed is ready to go!

I can hear another one peeping in the incubator now!! Time to go check again.

Don't count your chickens before....

...they hatch!

Well I'm not counting them yet, but I do have a few eggs wiggling and a little chirping going on!

My wait for some Swedish Flower Hen(SFH) chicks is about to come to an end. I ended up bidding on and winning an eBay auction for 20 eggs from a person in Pennsylvania. It wasn't great planning on my part as they were shipped over the 4th of July holiday week so they sat for a day somewhere in the postal system. Add to that the extremely hot and steamy temps we had that week and it made for less than ideal shipping conditions for fertile hatching eggs! They were package very well, none were broken or cracked on arrival. In addition to the 20 SFH eggs I also bought 10 Wheaten Marans eggs from the same person. Those too were in great shape when I unpacked them.

The eggs arrived on Friday July 6th. With how hot that week was I decided to set the eggs in the incubator right away instead of letting the air cells settle for 24 hours, in case they had started to develop during shipping. I just waited 24 hours before starting the auto-turner instead. This is my first time using our new R-com King Suro incubator. It's all digital, has a turning cradle and automatic humidity pump. So far it's been keeping the temp and humidity levels perfectly!

I candled the eggs on day 17 before they went into "lockdown". It looks like 10 SFH eggs will potentially hatch along with 6 Wheaten Marans. I'm not sure if I will keep the Marans chicks or not at this point. I was disappointed in the color of the eggs. I know Marans eggs have a range of colors but I expected them to be as dark or darker than my Penedesenca eggs. So I may put those chicks up for sale.

You can see a couple of the Marans eggs in the right corner in this picture.

In other news, we acquired another chicken coop! There was a 4' x 4' coop on Craigslist that we went to look at. I had been thinking about having a smaller coop that size built, possibly for some Silkies.  I'm not sure if we will get into Silkies or not, but it will work perfectly for a breeding coop. I will be able to have purebred hatching eggs available next spring! The SFH will be in the coop Dale built this year so I can put another breed in this coop. I'm thinking a blue egg layer. I'd love to get some Cream Legbars! However, I may have to settle for some Ameraucanas. I plan on getting a Penedesenca rooster to put in with the layer flock as well. It will be easy to pick out the eggs from the two Pene. hens in there and hatch those out too.

So keep your fingers crossed for a great hatch and I'll update in a few days on how things turn out!