Crikey – showing the age there.

On to the matter in hand. Our first home-reared flock of Light Sussex large fowl are now eight weeks old and looking amazing! One cockerel has already gone to a new home, and two others have homes promised. One will likely be staying here with us, at least until it’s breeding season and we need to bring an unrelated cockerel in, so we only have to find home for one more. The two ladies will stay here at Merrybower, to live with their mother Daisy. The photographs here are from two weeks ago when they were six weeks old and spent their first days outside. We quickly added an easy ramp to the eglu ramp, to help them up into the coop. We also found out that adding a red light inside the coop helped encourage them up the ramp to sleep.

The second batch of chicks hatched two weeks ago tomorrow, and we now have twelve little chicks in the house under the heat lamp – two large Light Sussex and ten bantam Light Sussex. I have a feeling one of the large Sussex is a lady – and we’ve named her ‘Smudge’. She was stuck in her egg – the humidity was too low and she couldn’t break out. We gave her 48 hours to try herself, but no joy, so we tentatively broke the shell from around her as she was so vocal and alive, chirping constantly that she wanted out of the egg. Bit by bit we broke bits off, hoping we wouldn’t damage any blood vessels, until eventually the top was off and we had to peel the egg shell from her back and the top of her head, figuring if we didn’t try anything then she would surely die, so at least she was having a chance. I’m so happy to say that two weeks on and she’s a delight! To keep a track of which chick she was, I coloured the toes on one foot with black indelible marker – hence her name Smudge 🙂 I call her ‘her’ as she’s slightly smaller than the other large Sussex, and less ‘upright’ when confronted. With our first batch I noticed the males tended to be more ‘male’, in that they held themselves in a dominant stance, chests puffed out and heads aloft, whereas the ladies were more amiable and less likely to push  themselves in the faces of others. All that said, this batch of complete Light Sussex seems a lot more placid than the mix of breeds we had last time, but then both parents were exceedingly gentle, the cockerel in particular – gentle and unafraid of humans.

They’re here! We started incubating on the 5th March at 8pm. You should ignore the first eight hours as the eggs need to reach the correct internal temperature before cell growth begins, so I counted from the early hours of the 6th. This meant we were due on Thursday 27th, early in the morning, given the 21 days incubation period needed.

So nineteen days in we set up the Brinsea Polyhatch, a 42 egg still air incubator we were going to use only for hatching. We separated the Derbyshire Redcaps and Light Sussex from the random banties, as bantams can be a bit early. The Polyhatch needed a higher temperature, 39.2 Celsius, as the thermometer was about an inch above the top of the eggs, and being still air the heat wasn’t moved around evenly. We filled both water trays to get the humidity up – an important thing for the last two days as it helps prevent the chick from getting stuck to the inside of the egg shell. We also plugged two of the ventilation holes in the lid, using kitchen towel.

Imagine our surprise then when on day nineteen I did my last check of the temperature before bedtime at 10pm, and heard a loud tweet from the Polyhatch! Looking back at me was the littlest Redcap you’ve ever seen – a bemused look on its face, surrounded by oval monoliths, like some curved version of 2001 Space Oddysey’s intro sequence. The morning after we had a Light Sussex join him (or her), and then the Bantam’s also started in the Octagon 20 Eco. By the end of day 21 we had all but two eggs hatched. The remaining two did hatch eventually, but both chicks later died – one Light Sussex and one Redcap. The Redcap had pipped three days perviously, but had failed to break the membrane beneath the shell. We helped it at the end by making a small hole in the membrane, and it managed to struggle out but was too weak to carry on. The Light Sussex had a bent leg, indicating that it had become stuck in the shell in an odd position. It also couldn’t turn itself to  break the egg shell further than the original pipping, and although we helped it out and put a splint on its foot (using a pipecleaner and micropore tape), it too failed to drink or eat.

So of the 26 eggs we set, two Redcaps and one bantam were infertile and removed before the hatching began. Of the 23 left, 21 hatched successfully – not bad for beginners 🙂