Opinion: Eggcellent

So the wife got these eggs that were supposed to be fertilized, chicken eggs that is. A friend has hens and roosters and apparently lives in a place where both are copacetic with the neighbors, or at least in a place where the neighbors can’t do anything about it, which is to say they live near Eureka, whose motto, I think, is “anything goes.”

I could be wrong on that.

At any rate, it was about a dozen eggs, some white, some brown. She brought them home in a carton and they sat on the kitchen counter for a few days until she could find her old egg incubator. You might think they would go bad, but they don’t. They have to be a certain temperature (warmer than my kitchen counter) to start to develop. Plus, the humidity has to be right, too.

The incubator had been sitting in a box in storage for more than 20 years, but it still worked. So she put the eggs in there and then every day twice a day they had to be rotated. You can buy a fancy egg incubator that rotates ‘em automatically, but the goal was to do this as cheaply as possible.

I already have a couple of chickens and after a long winter hiatus they started laying again. I also managed to pick up a chick from Murdoch’s in February. (Actually I picked up two, betting that the second one, which wasn’t looking so hot would survive. It lived all of three hours.)

You can take a lot of things back to Murdoch’s. But you can’t take back a dead chick. Don’t ask me how I know this.

I really don’t need more chickens, although an “insurance” bird or two wouldn’t hurt. It only takes one owl or hawk or wayward dog to thin the ranks in a hurry, never mind the bears. We have an electric fence, too. But last fall an owl got in the pen at night and killed all but two of them, the two adult hens I have left.

The day arrived that we thought the incubated eggs should hatch, but they didn’t. Then another day went by and one hatched and then another and another and finally one more. They were black chickens in brown eggs, so I first assumed they’re australorps, but now they’re showing white, so maybe they’re barred rocks, or some other variety I’m not familiar with.

Chickens can molt through a bunch of colors before they’re mature, so who knows.

 My wife had some white eggs, too, but none of those has hatched yet and she doesn’t think they will, and I’m pretty sure she’s right.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that any of the new chicks will be hens, but odds being what they are, the hope is at least two.

Still, if anyone is looking for rooster, send a me note in a month or so, I may have four to give away. Roosters are frowned upon in town, as one might imagine.

This chicken stuff is kind of fun and harmless, a nice diversion from high egg prices, which last I checked, were about $9 a dozen for brown eggs like the ones we’ve been getting from the hens poking around in our yard.

Have a good week.