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Last April's Hatch
Two frames we saved from the very first HatchCam

Last spring's Room 7 set twelve eggs on Thursday, April 1, 1999 (no joke). Two were clear at candling, so ten stayed in. Nine of the ten hatched on Thursday and Friday, April 22 and 23. The tenth never pipped. The class buried it under the lilac by the playground, and we talked about how that happens sometimes, even under a hen.

A wet, newly hatched dark chick lying on the wire floor of the incubator beside its broken shell, with brown eggs around it

Thursday, April 22, 1999, 9:47 a.m. Day 21. Our first chick of the spring, about ten minutes out of the shell. It's a Barred Rock: see the dark down and the pale belly. It pipped the night before, around supper time, so it took a little over fourteen hours from pip to hatch. Lots of Room 7 families watched the pip at home that night and e-mailed me about it the next morning. Look at the egg right behind it: that one has a pip hole too, and it was out by lunch.

Doesn't look much like an Easter chick yet, does it? That is what a just-hatched chick really looks like. Give it three hours.

Fluffy black and tan chicks huddled under a heat lamp in a cardboard box lined with pine shavings, with a red feeder and a jar waterer

Monday, April 26, 1999, 8:10 a.m. Four days old and fluffy. For brooder week we moved the camera over a big cardboard box on the floor by the sink. The lamp keeps one end warm and the other end cooler, so the chicks can move to where they feel right. If they all crowd under the lamp and peep loudly, they are cold. If they all stay away from it along the walls, they are too hot. In this picture they had just eaten breakfast and were napping in a pile in the warm spot, which is what chicks do after a meal.

The red base with the holes is the feeder, and the upside-down jar on the red base is the waterer. Every morning a different student cleaned the waterer and refilled the feeder before the bell.

The nine chicks went home to the Mullenax farm on Friday, April 30. Mrs. Mullenax says they are all hens but one, and the one rooster has been crowing since August.

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Last updated Sunday, September 26, 1999