Chick Update!

Our chick eggs have now been in the incubator for 10 days! Here is what our incubator looks like:

Here's our 24 chicken eggs in the incubator. They came from 2 different hens, so they are different colours!

This week, Miss MacKinnon and I decided to "candle" the eggs. Candling is basically an ultrasound for a baby chick! You hold the egg up to a very bright light (in a dark room) and you can see what is inside the egg. Candling is much harder to do with dark shelled eggs, but we decided to try it out. Here is our candling device. It is just a flashlight with black construction paper taped onto it. The egg sits at the top (with me holding it, of course).

When we candled the eggs, we saw 2 empty eggs (nothing in them, the light shone right through the egg). These eggs are infertile. We put question marks on them and returned them to the incubator. We will check them again in another couple of days. The remaining eggs all had a black blob in them. Miss MacKinnon and I have been driving ourselves crazy trying to figure out if those black blobs are indeed chicks! We have been researching lots, but still don't have a definite answer. We will candle again on Monday. It will be day 12 and by then, so if there is a chick in there it should be easier to see. If all goes well, we hope to show the children the candling process next week.

Here is more information on candling: http://shilala.homestead.com/candling.html

Here are two pictures of what we saw in our eggs (the children have not seen these pictures, so please feel free to share with them):

We sure hope it's baby chicks in there! More updates to come soon! :)