The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Poultry & Waterfowl => Topic started by: Kier on May 12, 2010, 10:40:56 pm
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Ok so as some of you may of read,1 of my bantam dominiques hatched today.We left it 6 hours and waited till he;s fluffed up and have moved him into the cage with a heat lamp.However he seems a bit lonely and as though he is looking for something else.As soon as i put my hand in he runs in and sits on it,its unreal lol however i'm thinking about putting a clean soft toy in there like a small duck or something to provide him with "company" until his brothers and sisters hatch and join him,What do you guys think of this idea?I've heard it done with wild birds to try and replicate their parents so they can be released back,but dunno about the implications of doing it like this
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we've done it before with no long term problems for the bird;tend to find that it snuggles up to it to sleep.
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sweet i'll give it a ago,Was just worried cause i heard about imprinting and thought the chick would get annoyed when it grows up and i move it away lol.thanks for the reply
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We tend to leave ours in the incubator until another few have hatched as the cheeping "eggs the others on" a bit (excuse the pun) and the eggs often cheep back. I think the cuddly toy is a nice idea though... Let us know how it goes
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We tend to leave the first ones up to 12 or 24 hours (depending on where night fits in!) before moving, gives others chance to hatch.
As a fair proportion of mine have been e-bay eggs and I only have small incubators, my perpetual worry has been 'what if only 1 hatches?' I have had hatches of 0 and 1 from such eggs, so now I add in 1 or 2 of my own (proven fertile) eggs just in case. Needless to say I then get quite a good hatch rate from the bought eggs!
Fortunately when I did just get 1 I'd had a batch hatch a couple of weeks earlier, so I put a couple of them in to 'mother' the new chick. Unfortunately the mothers turned out to be male, but never mind, no harm done!
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it worked for us last year when we had a bad hatch. the bad side is that the kid you nicked it off will be just a bit annoyed.
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we bought a toy mouse for the cat however we gave it to the chick for company before the cat,so the cat was the one that missed out on this occasion lol.We put two other chicks with it today and they've intergrated well.We've had two batches of eggs off ebay and so far *touch wood* we;ve had sucess on both occasions and hope to do it again.