The kids loved it! | Hatching Chicks & Keets

We wanted to add a few more chickens and guineas to our flock so we hatched out some of our eggs! This was an awesome experience and the kids loved every minute of it!

Ragon grew up with chickens and guinea fowl and we hatched out a batch just about every summer. It was a fun thing to do when school was out and those baby birds always made me so happy. Now I get to share this experience with my kids, Keeton and Riley, and my wife, Megan, as this was her first time hatching eggs as well.

We’re borrowing this incubator from a friend and it is much more high tech than the one Ragon grew up with. It makes incubation a breeze with the digital temperature and humidity readouts and auto-turner.

Once the birds hatch it’s important to leave them in the incubator for a while so they dry completely. Their cheeping also encourages the other eggs to hatch. Right before hatching baby chicks absorb the remaining yolk sac in the egg so they don’t need food and water for a period of time (God’s design is incredible, isn’t it?).

★ Reference: https://extension.psu.edu/programs/4-h/counties/montgomery/school-enrichment/embryology/hatching

A few days later the guinea keets hatched. The hatch rate was not as good as we had with the chickens and we suspect that was due to mixing the guinea eggs in with the chicken eggs (chicken eggs hatch after a 21-day incubation and guineas are about 26-28 days). Lesson learned.

We moved our baby birds to a brooder where they’ll spend the next several weeks growing. We plan to keep the guineas and we may hang on to one or two hens. We just started another round of guineas eggs, too, and hopefully we get a good hatch. Eventually we would like to get our own incubator, and add some ducks and geese to the flock, so if we can sell some of the chicks and keets that will help out immensely. You watching this video helps, too, so thank you so much!
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