We had our first chicken hatch on Monday 22nd March at 4.41pm.
Here is a photo of Nugget – it is a bit hard to see as it is in the incubator.
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On Tuesday 23rd March at 10:30am we had 2 more chicks hatch, and 1 in the evening of Wednesday 24th March. We have 1 egg left and we are waiting to see if it hatches or not.
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| Nugget | Chick Hatching | |||
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The chicks are now between 1 – 3 days old. Look at how big they look compared to the egg shell. |  |
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| The chicks have very fluffy feet. | They are getting lots of feathers |
30th March 2010
Our chicks have today gone home to live with their Mum’s. We have really enjoyed having them and watching them grow. They are starting to flap their wings and get all their feathers.
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These photos were taken at the end of April. Our chicks are growing big! See if you can spot which ones are ours.
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This half term the School has decided to try and hatch some chicken eggs. This is something we have not tried before and we will therefore be keeping it quite low key. We have started with 12 eggs, but please remember we do not know if they have babies in them or not.
Our eggs were placed in the incubator at 1pm on Monday 1st March. This is what they look like. Our incubator is at a temperature of 37.5 and takes the place of a Mum hen. Instead of Mum sitting on the eggs to keep them warm and hatch them our incubator will do that job. A hen would normally turn her eggs from time to time – our incubator will also do that job for her.
Chicken eggs take 21 days to hatch, so all being well ours will hatch on Monday 22 March. This is how the chicks will develop
Around 20 days after it was laid the chicks can be heard cheeping from inside the egg. The next day it starts to peck at the shell to break out. It can take a whole day for the chick to make it out the egg.
When the chick does make it out of the egg its feathers are wet. Its feet will look very large for its body. The chick will dry out and soon look fluffy. The baby chicks may not eat or drink anything for a few days as they still have food and water in their tummies from when they were inside the egg.
Baby chicks grow very fast. After a week it will get adult feathers. It will get fatter and its neck will get longer. The feet will not look so big and out of place. The chick will learn how to clean itself and will then be ready to go back to live with its mum and dad and all the other chickens.
We have eggs from different types of chickens to try and hatch – these are what our chickens may look when they are older:
| Black Pekin | Mott Pekin | Blue Pekin |
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| Lavender Pekin | White Pekin | Gold Pekin |
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Fingers crossed we get some that hatch!
