So, I thought incubating eggs was really easy and didn’t require too much effort but boy was I wrong! Our first batch of eggs didn’t hatch at all! I believe the problem was with the humidity. See, here in Austin, Texas it is naturally rather humid. And I mean REALLY humid. The humidity level inside our house was about 55-60%. That was way too high for the chicks and I think they unfortunately drowned inside their egg shells.

Now this time around, I set the incubator humidity to 35%. I didn’t add water at all. This is called the dry hatching method. There were a few bad eggs but the hatch rate was about 66%! We got 10 beautiful baby chicks out of the 15 original eggs I put in. Half of those were collected just after laying and there the hatch rate was higher at 75%. The eggs I took from under the broody hen in the coop only had about a 50% hatch rate, however they did hatch sooner since they had already been “incubating” so to speak for some time.

Out of the ten live baby chicks, we got 4 barred cross black chicks and six white dorking crosses with four of them having some Easter Egger characteristics. I think we have a good mix of roosters and hens in there with what looks like 5 roosters and 5 hens even!