hatching eggs again...

The one time we come home after dark because of work - I was part of our local annual Artist Market - a fox had gotten into the coop and killed about half our flock! I did not even notice when I closed the door Friday night... but the next morning it was quite clear something had happened, apart from the couple dead bodies in the building itself, the rest of the flock was very quiet and demure... I lost a khaki campbell (two more the next night when I put them in our veggie yard on slug patrol, apparently the veggie yard fence was not high enough, poor birds) and about 10 chickens, including my two new home grown roosters!

And how did I know it was a fox? Because the triple next door neighbors saw it trotting past their porch Friday evening with one of my chicken in it's mouth! Their dog immediately ran at it and scared it to drop the boy, it was one of my boy roosters, and it took shelter under their porch. A day or two later he was calm enough I could come over and catch it - but even though I was very relieved and grateful they called about the homeless chick I did not want to get it; it was Them. That was soo strange, even though they had their little two year old toddler grand daughter running around and I wanted to invite them to our bi-weekly playgroups I just could not get the words out of my mouth... all that cause the man of the house decided to become territorial to all his neighbors with his 30 acre property... oh well, at least I had my boy back.

So, to make up for the losses we put about 35 chicken eggs and about 12 duck eggs in my two new incubators. They're the ones I got (for free!) on craigslist so I did not know whether they would even run, or if they would hold their temperature - but low and behold, two of the three work perfectly and one of the automatic egg turners works fine too!

It feels so "lazy" to have a turner - I'm used to turn them all by hand. But I must say, I have not incubated that many eggs at once before! I am so curious to see all the different chick combinations - we have quite the collection now... hatching sure is fun :-)