Incubation Project with Nore Valley Park

This term we were delighted to work with Nore Valley Park and hatch some chicks in our classroom as part of their incubation project!

The fertilised eggs were in the incubator for 21 days at 37 degrees!

The eggs were candled at 10 days to see if there were growing any little chicks!

Candling is when you hold the egg above a strong light and inspect the inside of the egg for a growing embryo. Can you see the veins?

You can see a diagram of how the egg changes each day below.

​We had 7 eggs, and 3 of them hatched into beautiful little chicks on days 22 and 23.

Everybody meet Sunny, Chiquitita and Conor McEggor!

quickly The first sign of hatching is called 'pipping'. This is when the chicks use their egg tooth to crack the egg from the inside! They spin around inside the egg until they have cracked the whole way around the egg and then they make their way out into the world!

If you listen carefully you might even hear the chicks cheeping!

The egg tooth quickly falls off - hence the saying 'as scarce as hens teeth!'.

When the chicks were born, their feathers were still very wet and they stayed in the incubator to dry out. It got a little cramped before they made the big move into the brood box! Their feathers had to completely dry off and puff up before they could leave the incubator.

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It didn't take too long before they were ready to make the big move into the brood box with a heating pad and everything they would need to keep growing!

Chicks in the egg have absorbed all the nutrients from the yolk before they hatch and so they do not need food or water for the first day or so.

We wasted no time giving them lots of cuddles and attention! 

We were absolutely thrilled to be a part of the incubation project! We will be sad to see the chicks go back to the farm but they were great members of our class if not a little 'chirpy!'