Hatching eggs and rearing chicks
We decided in 2007 to try to rear some chicks for the first time. The idea was that any females would go into the layer flock and any males on to the table. There are lots of books about hatching eggs and rearing chickens. Katie Thear's "Incubation: A Guide to Hatching and Rearing" was the one we used as reference.
If you are going to hatch eggs, you need fertile eggs and either an incubator or a broody hen. You can buy fertile eggs or you can get a cockerel to run with your own hens. We opted for the latter but if you live in a built-up area, be warned - cockerels really are noisy and they're noisy all day, not just at sunrise.
All our hens are modern strains bred not to go broody, so we rely on our Brinsea 10 Automatic incubator. Not surprisingly, it takes about 10 eggs and has an automatic turning cradle, which we would recommend since eggs have to be turned four to six times a day (and night). It would be nice to raise some naturally - and it would probably much easier since the hen will naturally know what she's doing!
We hatched two broods in 2007. For the first we collected all eggs for three days, picked what we thought were the best in terms of shape and size (medium sized and neatly egg shaped) and incubated them. We got three chicks - two female and one male. The second time we only collected eggs from the Light Sussex hens, so we knew the offspring were pure bred, since we had a Light Sussex cockerel. This time we got one female and three males. Don't keep eggs too long before you incubate them as viability decreases - a few days is best.
We kept the incubator in the guest bedroom, so that it would be free from wide temperature fluctuations. The instructions for the incubator were pretty straightforward. The incubation period for hen eggs is 21 days - the tension on Day 21 was palpable. No doubt once we've done dozens of batches, we'll be quite relaxed but the first two batches were very tense.
When the eggs started to hatch, the temptation was to get involved and help. In my limited experience, I've both left well alone and helped and either would have been both the right and the wrong thing to do, in different circumstances. So no help there, then.
Once the chicks hatched, we left them in the incubator for 24 hours to dry off then we transferred them to a brooder made from two cardboard boxes and a heat lamp. You can buy brooders or build your own. Our brooder was a small box inside a larger box with a "door" cut between the two, with the lamp over the small box and an unheated part with food and water. The chicks soon get the idea of going back and forward.
We feed Organic Chick Crumbs, from The Organic Company. These do not contain any coccidiostat, which is a drug to control coccidiosis. If we start to have a disease problem, we may need to review this. To encourage the chicks to feed, we sprinkled crumbs on the base of the box - the movement seems to attract the chicks' attention and encouraged them to peck. We've never had a problem with chicks not being able to work out how to eat or drink.
Once the chicks got a bit bigger, they went into the puppy cage, which was floored with slip resistant rubber matting (as used for horse boxes) and sprinkled with hemp. They had a cardboard box with the heat lamp, a feeder and water container. They did make a mess and the wire sides of the puppy cage didn't keep it all enclosed, so some adaptation for this year was required.
On nice days, the whole shebang went outside, without the heat lamp, of course. Then we started to put them in the small Forsham ark during the day - in the top, so they learned to come down the ladder - and back indoors to the puppy cage at night, using the cat basket to transfer them back and forward. Once they had feathers at about 8 weeks, they stayed out in the Forsham ark and moved to organic grower / finisher pellets, with access to grit and a bit of mixed corn. Instinct drove them upstairs to roost when it got dark.
We did mix the batches and put the three females together and the four males. The females were fine after some initial sorting of the pecking order, but we had to take out the single male as I thought he was going to kill the younger males. The pullets were kept together until they came into lay, and then introduced into the layer flock. The three males from batch 2 were kept together until I accidentally let them out...