If you’re interested in taking care of chickens from young you can choose to adopt day old baby chickens (from a chicken supplier) so you need to deal with the hatching process.
Or if you’re adventurous you can opt to get fertile chicken hatching eggs and experience the full cycle of the chicken’s life.
Hatching Eggs with a Hen
If you are already taking care of a flock of hens, then you may decide for this more natural way of hatching your eggs. When you let a brooding hen sit on the chicken eggs that you want to hatch, the whole process needs less intervention from you.
Now, while this method more or less ensures that optimal conditions are kept for your chicken hatching eggs, there are also still a couple of issues that you have to deal with.
Basically, what you will have to do is to take special care of the hen that you’ve assigned to hatching duty.
Now, if that doesn’t deter you then you should start the preparations for the nest that will be used to hatch the eggs. First, you must pick a quiet and dark area of the chicken shelter and prepare a nest with a lot of bedding underneath.
With the nest prepared, you can set around eight to ten chicken hatching eggs in the nest while the brooding hen is out to feed. This is important because brooding hens get grumpy and may start attacking you when they see you close to their nest (since they’ll think you’re taking eggs when you’re actually putting them in.)
When the brooding hen finds them, you can check if she’ll actually continue to brood on them. Try to take her away from the nest a few times and check if she’ll immediately return.
From there on, you’ll just have to take care of the brooding hen. You must make sure that there is enough food and water close to the nest since the hen will remain seated on the eggs until they hatch.
You also might need to separate this hen from the rest of the flock since the other chickens might fight over the nest (and you wouldn’t really want multiple brooding chickens unless you have a lot of chicken hatching eggs)
After a few weeks, you should start to hear some tiny peeps from the nest. Yay!
Using an Incubator
If you don’t already have a brooding hen to sit on your chicken hatching eggs or if you simply don’t want to disturb your flock, then you may also opt to use an incubator; Using an incubator means that you will have to do most of the work.
Of course to start with, you have to secure the eggs and an incubator. For the eggs you can purchase fertile chicken hatching eggs or you can gather them from the nest of your flock that has a rooster in the pen with them.
Without a rooster the eggs that you’ll get haven’t been fertilized and will not hatch. For the incubator, you can either purchase one or you can make one yourself.
While you’re setting up the incubator, make sure to keep the eggs in a warm area that is around 50 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit. You must then set it up to optimum warmth, airflow and humidity by starting it up a few days before you actually place the eggs in.
When you’re done setting up the incubator, you must then mark one side of each of the eggs; This will help you determine if you’ve already turned the eggs as you will be turning them over once a day for eighteen days.
Do not turn them after the eighteen day period and just wait until they hatch. At this point you can test for infertile eggs by “candling” them; Holding the egg up to a light to see if there is any chick development.
Wait until all the eggs hatch and then clean up the incubator. And that should be it, you’re now a parent to a new flock of chicks!
