Don’t Count Your Chicks Before They Hatch

A bit of a delayed post, but we have chicks! They’re actually about a week old today and tomorrow, and they’ve had a seemingly eventful week!

First of all, let me just point out that they are cute as a button, first of all.

This chick has a calico face. In case you couldn’t see that, it has a cat-face. 

However, not all of them made it. We had a power outage last week, a few days before they hatched. The power went out when all the snow melted and it began to rain. We’re not quite sure where it is, but somewhere there’s water getting into the electrics which is throwing the switch. It’s fine if we know it happens. It’s just a matter of going to the barn and switching it back on. But this happened during the night. The incubator is in our room, and I woke up about 4 or 5 in the morning and realized the power was out. By the time Guy was alert enough to understand what was going on and get the power back on, it was 8 or 9, and it was cold in there.

Apparently that was enough to deter a few of the eggs from hatching. One unfortunate egg got to the point where it was starting to hatch, but just wasn’t strong enough and died.

When we went to the Clitheroe auction on Valentines Day we bought 18 eggs. Granted, my elbow eliminated three of those eggs (the Wyandottes), which meant only 15 made it to the incubator. Of those 15, five more didn’t make it to hatching. I’m happy to say we have 10 chicks pecking and scratching around, one pure silkie, 7 mixed silkies, and two wyandottes. But I’m also sad to say only ten hatched.

Thus is nature.

And the learning curve.

And temperamental environments.

We decided that they would stay in our room since it’s the only place that we can keep an eye on the temperature and is the steadiest-temperatured room in the house. When we build a fire in the living room, all we have to do is be asleep when it dies out and it get pretty cold in there.

However, we’ve got a heat lamp which is working pretty well. I get to watch them all the time while I’m working on my homework, feed them, clean their water and the like. The heat lamp doesn’t give off any light, so we keep the lamp next to it and on. If the lamp goes off during the night, we know the power is off.

Which is exactly what we experienced this morning.

I woke up and saw the lamp was off. What actually woke me up were the chicks trying to get under each other. They’re in a plastic tub, like what you’d get at B&M or Home Bargains, and so their movements are pretty audible. But their scrambling to get under each other was causing quite a racket. I realized it was freezing in the room. Guy went to the barn and tried to get the power back on. We had some smaller boxes, a little smaller than a shoe box. I put the chicks in there (who weren’t too active at this time because they were so cold), and brought them under the duvet with me, and tried to heat them as much as I could with my own body heat. It worked a little bit.

Meanwhile, the light flickered on and off. On Guy’s end, the power switch would trip almost as soon as it turned on. Eventually he gave up and we both huddled under the blanket trying to keep the chicks warm.

We were deciding what to do about it, considering hot water bottles (which we don’t have, though now are on our list), trying to muster getting the fire in the living room going (though that would have taken a while to heat it enough for the chicks to benefit from the effects) to bringing the chicks into the car and blasting the heat.

One of the farmers got ahold of us once she realized there wasn’t any power going to us. Our power isn’t hooked up to the same system as her power, but it is on the same system as the horse stalls and the tack shed. She had a few suggestions, and with those Guy was able to get the power back on.

The chicks are fine now. They’re drinking their water, having their feed and just being baby chickens who don’t know that they can’t fly yet, charging into one another, and just being damn adorable.

Don’t worry, this picture is a few days old. They aren’t living in that dirty of an environment. They have clean paper and water.

We’re preparing for another batch of eggs to incubate. But we need to make sure we have steady power. Something like what happened this morning might have been enough to kill any eggs in incubation. Or if this had happened this time last week when they had just hatched then it might have been enough to kill them.

We have a couple of ideas for backup solutions, though are happy to hear any suggestions you might have. Keeping in mind, buying a generator probably isn’t in our budget just yet.