Woohoo! 21 days and counting ......

[PillockOfTheCommunity]

We have a cockerel....
We have a very very stroppy hen sitting on eggs....

Fingers crossed that very soon we'll have CHICKS

What breed are they P?
< Excited for you>

erm.........

interesting question that

they'd be little brown one (bantam?) mixed with very large grey fluffball one (persian? silkie?)

Excited anyway
My silkie/frizzle chicks hatched about five weeks ago and one of them made a weird crowing noise...a bit young i thought but made a mental note to fatten it up......

Fantastic Pillock! I love chicks, they are just sooo adorable. Are you going to candle the eggs?

am I going to what????
I keep chickens because it's fun, and my brother wanted to, I don't have any idea what I'm doing really

you can check the development of the eggs, to see if everything's going ok..and then towards the end you can hear the chicks peeping inside the eggs.
I'm soo impatient I can never just wait for nature to take it's course

it's very easy.
you will need
a small cardboard box with a little hole cut in it
a torch
a black cloth
When your broody gets off the eggs for a drink, very gently take out an egg.
put your torch (on!) inside the box shining up through the hole. Put the egg on top of the hole. cover yourself and box with black cloth so it's really dark.
After one week you should be able to see capilleries and stuff, if you can see nothing at all it usually means egg is not developing.
After this you can see the air sac which gets bigger and bigger the further things progress the other end of the egg (the chick) is black. towards the end you can see wet feathers and stuff moving and then the chicks peep because the are warm with the light of the torch. It's really fascinating

pmsl
I'm so not telling my brother any of that, he'll be camped out in the garden waiting for her to move

I would never be that impatient, honest

this explains it better pillock
candling eggs

actually, that just sounds frigging complicated, I like your explaination better

yeah, good pics of what you should see though.
As more encouragement it is a good idea to do it, because eggs with bacterial problems can seriously explode. If a hen keeps pushing an egg out of the nest it's because it no good btw

just rang bro (I know, but the excitement got too much for me ) and he knew

I said why the blardy heck hadn't he told me then, and to get his backside round here now

Ooh me too. Lulu my Partridge Wyandotte is sitting on 6 Red Dorking eggs. Due 15th April.

I bought myself a candler after three disappointing non hatches last summer.

If you are going to candle do it day 10, can't really see much before then.

good luck Pillock

now if you're anything like me pillock, I would have tried this by now.... (told you seriously impatient )
So... have you or bro tried?

he's buggered off on holiday...
and i'm too scared of the hen to do it

PMSL pillock....
Seriously?

seriously
she's frigging scary, always has been!

Is it 'attila the hen'? Or is that someone elses scary chicken?

last year she was broody, we didn't have the cockerel then, and she pecked my flippin foot to pieces when i tried to push her off the nest!

Look on the bright side, she probably won't be the sort of hen that gives up nesting halfway through. And she may even calm down once she's hatched her first chicks (works with horses)!

LOL
god hens and ducks are stupid though.
I once had a duck who died on a nest because I couldn't break it up. Every time I found her nest, she'd build another somewhere else and this went on for months, eventually I found her dead.