Starting a backyard flock with a small incubator and some hatching eggs can be fun and educational. How successful you are at hatching chicken eggs in an incubator will depend on a number of factors, some of which are out of your control — such as the inherent degree of difficulty in hatching eggs from […]
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Some chicken breeds make great broody hens. Others are iffy. Still others are completely unreliable. And some never go broody at all. What does broody mean and why does it matter? Broodiness, in a nutshell, is maternal instinct. After a hen has accumulated a nestful of eggs, maternal instinct tells her to keep the eggs […]
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Sooner or later nearly every poultry keeper will want to try hatching eggs in a mechanical device known as an incubator. With the huge number of different egg incubators now available, selecting a model can be daunting. In choosing the best model to fit your needs, consider each of these features: Price First […]
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A Minnesota firm has obtained a patent for an incubator that can alter the sex of an egg before it hatches. Naturally hatched eggs result in about 50 percent females and 50 percent males. Anyone who has ever hatched eggs hoping for a majority of laying hens knows the problem — too many roosters. To […]
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An egg tooth is a tiny horn-like projection at the tip of the upper beak of a newly hatched chick. Soon after the chick hatches, the egg tooth falls off. Domestic poultry and other birds share this trait in common with most reptiles. When a chicken egg is incubated, the egg tooth begins to […]
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