Ordering fertile eggs on eBay: our first bad experience
The summer season up here in Orkney is only short so as soon as the first batch of our chickens hatched we were eager and ready to put more eggs in the incubator! Once again, we turned to eBay as we had great success with ordering fertile eggs online in the past and found a listing for 12 fertile Welsummer chicken eggs. Welsummers looked promising - hardy, good foragers, independent - just what we like for our free-ranging backyard flock! Our incubator can hold 28 eggs so on 3rd June 2018 we placed the order for 2 batches of eggs and eagerly awaited their arrival.
A couple of days later a package of 12 eggs arrived and we were slightly puzzled - didn’t we order 24? We decided to wait another day to see if the post service comes with the second batch but when that didn’t happen we contacted the seller who admitted to misreading our order and was going to dispatch another 12 eggs to us right away! The eggs arrived and on the 9th of June and armed with full 24 Welsummer eggs plus 4 more from our own flock we turned the incubator on! We were considering sending the Welsummer eggs back and getting a refund as we didn’t hold a lot of hope for them hatching, but as I said - our summer is only short and we couldn’t afford a lot of delay. It was worth a try!
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A fully automated Brinsea Ovation 28 Eco Egg Incubator with eggs
We ran the dry incubation method again as we had great success before and there was no need of candling which we haven’t learned yet. We set the eggs and completely forgotten about them, letting the trusty Brinsea incubator do all the hard work until 29th of June came along and I heard a slight muffled chirp coming from inside - it was day 21 and time for a lock down! Here is my initial reaction Tweet from that exciting moment:
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All of my poultry books say that chickens eggs usually hatch in 21 days but our past experience taught us to expect a slight delay in hatching - perhaps that’s due to lower temperature up here in Orkney or the pressure being somewhat different, I’m not sure. But, day 21 came and went, day 23 came and went and we started to lose hope for the eggs hatching at all - especially considering the palaver that they’ve gone through to come to us in the first place!
Then, one night as we were tucked in bed and trying to fall asleep (it is often difficult as the summer sun in Orkney doesn’t set and it’s usually as bright as daylight at 1 am!) we heard a chirp! It was a definite chirp that can only mean a new chick was born! I was so excited but we knew it was going to be fine until the morning. The morning of 24th June 2018 dawned and we found not one but two baby chicks inside the incubator! It was day 24 and we were so excited. However, our intuition was correct - the two hatchlings came from our own farmyard chicken eggs and not the eggs we ordered on eBay!
Cute black baby chick
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Another cute black chick
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Later than evening another chick looked like it was going to hatch - yey, this was a Welsummer - but it unfortunately got stuck inside the white inny egg layer. When it looked like it couldn’t do it on its own, we tried to help it by gently removing the outer shell. A quick internet research suggested that it’s often best to leave an egg inside the warm moist incubator than exposing it to cold and dry environment so in the end we let it be thinking it had a better chance of hatching by itself than having our inexperienced hands blindly prodding and poking it.
Trying to help a stuck baby chick
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A baby chick stuck inside the egg
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Unsuccessful hatch
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We decided to let the incubator run for another day, just to give eggs another chance and on day 25 found another little chick inside. It was definitely a Welsummer but not the one stuck inside its egg - it was a brand new chick. We placed all 3 healthy chicks (who all look the same, so we can’t tell them apart anymore!) inside a brooder and stopped the incubator. There were no further signs of life anywhere inside the incubator, the stuck baby chick had stopped moving too so it was time for us to admit that our initial feeling was correct - this batch wasn’t going to be an astounding success. Three baby chicks in the brooder was already a better result than we were expecting so we were happy to stop it there.
Welsummer chick (one of them anyway!)
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Three fluffy baby chicks
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A part of me is wishing we had sent the eggs back and taken a refund (that would have been a better decision for our wallet) but there is another part of me that tells me this was yet another lesson learned and those truly are invaluable for first time new homesteaders that we are.
Unhatched eggs from eBay
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Disposing of unhatched eggs
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Composting unhatched eggs
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