just like blade runner

After Lou-weeze refused to cooperate in my dreams of fluffy baby chicks peeking out from a proud mother hen, I decided to hatch some the way god and Philip K Dick intended, in a machine.

Judy had an incubator that she used to hatch chicks every year in her 4th grade classroom. It looks like a styrofoam cooler with a heating element stuck to the top. I felt skeptical that it might work, especially after we found the heating coil broken and super glued it back together. But I put 18 eggs in it anyway and turned them by hand three times a day, every day for 17 days. The instruction sheet that came with the incubator said to stop turning the eggs on the 18th day and that on the 21st day they should hatch.

Yesterday after work, I was home having a snack when I heard
"PEEP!"
I looked at Peter. "It sounds like there's a bird in here," he said.
"peep PEEP!"

BABY CHICKENS!

I ran over to the incubator and opened it (which, by the way, I later read not to do because it screws up the humidity) and saw that one of the eggs had a crack in it!
I immediately went on the internet and learned that it can take up to 24 hours for a baby chicken to make its way out of the egg. All evening we heard peep peep PEEP!!! PEEP! as the chicken tried to get out. If you peeped at the incubator it would peep back at you. The cat took to sitting on the machine, his motives probably not all together altruistic, but awfully cute anyways.

Last night at 2:30 Peter woke me up. "It sounds like there is alot of rattling going on down there." I sleepily went down stairs and shined the flashlight through the little window. There was a tiny chicken staggering around inside! I cheered it on and went back to sleep.

This morning there were 2 more! They were mostly dry so I moved them to the brooder I had ready in the other room. Peter called me this morning at work with the news that 3 more had hatched and there were 2 more working on it.

If I thought getting chickens in the mail was fun, hatching them is even better. They are even more cute and disoriented at birth than they are when they're 2 days old. They stagger around, taking 2 steps and then flopping over flat on their stomachs to sleep for 3 minutes before jumping up again. It's totally hilarious and adorable.

Welcome to our farm, chickens!

i used my very best community college photoshop skills to fix the red tint the heat light gives the pictures, but they still aren't very good. However, I feel like I've given them a sci-fi cast that goes along with being birthed from the womb of a Styrofoam box full of wires.