This February we raised chickens. Now, we don’t live on a farm. Oh no. Our farm is a three-bedroom townhouse, and two of the bedrooms are occupied by people. Our farm is actually more like a one-room show. Of course, we didn’t get to keep the chicks. Before they learned how to fly up onto my library shelves, they went back to the farm where they began. But for a few weeks we had some fantastic and very educational pets.
When I was in grade three, I visited a farm where there were chicks and ducklings. I was entranced. I’ve wanted to hatch chicks ever since. On a local homeschooling email list I learned about an egg farmer who was branching out into school-based talks and the rental of hatching equipment. While there are formal organizations that help you hatch eggs in the classroom, many of them seem to be prohibitively expensive for homeschoolers. This one wasn’t. She came to our house, she helped me set up the incubator, and she provided food for the chicks.
We plugged in the incubator and arranged the eggs carefully in their little egg turners so that they’d get warmed on all sides. Then we waited. We waited for three weeks. Every day, we placed some more water in the incubator and checked the humidity levels. Then there was peeping, then more peeping. At first I thought that it was in my head, but then I realized that there were really, truly little chickens in there, announcing their imminent arrival into the world.
Over the next two days, we spent most of the time glued to the incubator, watching as four chicks made their way into the world: two brown, one yellow, and one black. We named them, and for the next two weeks my daughter held them and enjoyed their company very much. It was a sad day when they went back to the farm, but we’ll be going to visit them in late May.
The entire process was vastly educational. While it’s possible to read about hatching in books, seeing it yourself, with all of the blood and umbilical cords and near-death experiences and feeding newborn chicks, it’s another experience entirely. We’ll definitely be doing it again next year.
Image courtesy of dudek35 at Stock Exchange.