Brabanters

[TomK]

Well...thought i would take a breather from entertaining my cousin/guests and write a bit before i head out to clean coops...a while back my friend Debbie asked if it was possible to get some BCMaran hatching eggs from me and if so, how much would i charge her...i toyed with the numbers but hey, she's a friend so it was hard for me so i basically gave her a coupla dozen..at the same time i collected some of the eggs from my 3 Brabanter pen, the hatchmate proper trio and at maybe 2 eggs a day it takes a while but I asked her to incubate 6 for me when she did the Marans...I also collected more eggs in the mean time and a week later gave her 7 more and a week after that 8 more....she hatched out her Maran eggs and of the 24 eggs i gave her she got 17 chicks and is tickled..they came from quite dark eggs and is looking forward to that in the future from these birds as well..pretty good hatch i thought...out of my initial 6 i got three and i may have told you folks about that already and they are doing well...and last Thursday i got 6 more out of the second batch of 7 eggs..all 6 have integrated easily with the previous 3 slightly older chicks with only mild curiosity shown by the bigger ones...and on the 4th of July I will get whatever hatches out of the last batch of 8 eggs along with 4 more Maran eggs i threw into the carton when i took these over to her...hoping not too many cockerals....sheesh..pics to follow as soon as i set up white lighting rather than the red heat lamp...that just makes for very poor quality pictures and you folks deserve the best..lol..

[Happy]

[windwalkingwolf]

whoo hoo!!! congratulations!

[Jaye]

Congrats, @TomK , that's a really good hatch rate!
Here's hoping they are all or mostly pullets.

[Kbr42]

Fingers crossed for you, pullets only! Congratulations on the great hatch!

[kenya]

Congratulations!

[TomK]

Last batch started to pip this morning...last candling out of 8 eggs there were 7 viable...fingers crossed....

[Kbr42]

Good luck!

[kenya]

Well?

[TomK]

Sheesh!.. Some people are on the edge of their seats it seems..ok ok...i picked up
5 more chicks yesterday...makes the total 14...three small hatches and the last little bird juat got helped out of the shell yesterday morning and my friend was so worried about the heat in her home (sans AC) that the concern was they couldnt maintain steady temps in the brooder..weird house but hey, I dont live there...anyway, home they came...I was worried that the little wee guy/gal would get picked on for the residue on its feathering so i gently washed as much off as i could and dried it and put it back in with the crew last night..no issues but it is the weakest of the 5 so time will tell...three age groups and no issues..they are quite fun to watch...Brabanters are wary, and a little skittish it seems but are a really beautiful bird and I really like them...lets see how they turn out..