Chickens Hatching

By far the best method of watching chickens hatching is to leave it all to the mother hen, who will sit on the eggs for the required 21 days of incubation, turn them as necessary, keep them at the correct body temperature and look after the chicks when they come out.

This is not, however, the preferred method of having chickens hatching nowadays.  For most people starting out in poultry keeping, they need to incubate eggs which they have bought.

Hatching eggs are very easily obtained now through the internet, not only for commercial breeds but for rare breed chickens.  A chicken can lay an egg every day, but supermarket eggs are all infertile, so you cannot use these for hatching (this is not true of quail eggs, where it is worth trying!).  Hatching eggs are fertile eggs.  Kept cool, they will remain fertile and stable for ten to fourteen days after being laid.  The embryo inside will not start to develop until it is placed in a warm incubator.

In order to hatch the eggs, you need to have an egg incubator, in which they are kept at a steady temperature of 100 to 102 degrees Fahrenheit.  It is possible to buy a small incubator that will take only 15 eggs for a very reasonable price.

Run the incubator for 24 hours before putting the eggs in.  Place all the eggs, lying on their sides, in rows in the incubator. 

In the natural world, the mother hen turns the eggs regularly.  If this is not done, the yolk will stick to the shell on one side and this will prevent the chickens hatching.  So you must turn the eggs 3 times in every 24 hours.  Make a cross on one side of the egg so that you know which ones you have turned.

A much easier and more efficient method is to buy an incubator which turns automatically - the incubator fits onto a trestle and cogs turn it from side to side.  This is an excellent time-saving investment.

After the eggs have been in the incubator for 18 days, stop turning them, or lift the incubator off its trestle

On the 21st day, you may be able to hear the chicks cheeping from inside the egg. (This is quite ridiculously exciting!)  Soon the first chick will start to break the egg shell open - it has a little tooth on top of its bill to do this.  DO NOT TRY TO HELP - really really really!.  It can take a chick several hours to get out - that's fine.  It will take a couple of days for all the chicks to get out. They will not all hatch.  Even big commercial growers only expect a 75% success rate.

Make sure you have a warm brooder to put the new chicks in once they have dried out.