This hatching really hasn’t gone well.
Out of the eight eggs I put in the incubator one hatched, another one started to hatch and a day and a half later I did the no-no of trying to help the chick out (I REALLY wanted the one chick to have a friend) but it lived for a few hours and then died.
Another egg I found had a small chip in it and had dried up inside. And the other five… Well I’m sure they have chicks in (because of the weight of them) but they’re just not showing any signs of life, or hatching.
And to cap it all my ONE chick died for no reason at all!
I came in at about seven o’clock from cleaning out the chickens and was going to sit with a cup of tea (with honey not sugar) for half an hour ‘watching tele’ which really means watching the chick as the brooder is next to the tele and the chick is a lot more interesting. I watched it pondle around a bit, have some feed, sit in the feed dish looking at me for a while, then it went over and had a drink and came back to the lamp and settled down and went to sleep, all very normal behaviour, then it just stop breathing.
That was it, nothing I could do.
A Life Less Simple 