The broilers are now 5 weeks old and they are escaping their area. Today my daughters and I where out taking care of the place and the chicks seen me and run towards us till they hit the fence, They then started squeezing through the holes in the poultry netting and getting out, not one but about 50. They ran start towards us and started peeping. My daughters thought it was funny and great and the chicks all followed us around for about an hour then had to put them back. I have been very impressed with the way the energy of these broilers. They act just like a normal chick, but grow WAY faster. They are all over the place,nothing like the Cornish X's. These broilers will live out a full and adventurous life.

Tomorrow we will be setting 8 more Cuckoo Marans eggs that we got from a breeder out of NC into the hatcher. We where not pleased with the color of the eggs. Marans do start to loose darkness to the egg colors as they get in to laying season, but they should still hold some degree of color. At any rate we will be hatching out the eggs. They where sent to us in the mail and we candled them at day 10 and day 17 we had about 1/2  not fertilized 4-6 out of 12, but shipping can have this affect too. Shipped eggs are hard to get a good hatch rate and they are just plain hard on the eggs themselves. But we recieved darker Cuckoo eggs locally and we are more pleased with them, so we will be selling off any if any hatch from the shipped eggs, as we only want Marans that will lay a dark egg and not pale out that far. It could be that these birds have been being pushed real hard in laying as a lot of breeders do this to try and make the almighty dollar.

The Narrgansett hens laid another egg today, so they are getting into the mood. We have set the two in the incubator to check fertility on them. You do this by candling the eggs at day 7  to look for an growing embryo in the egg, which looks like a small dot with viens coming off it. If it is not fertile it will glow bright from the light all the way through the egg, with nothing,a small dot no viens or a ring(death ring).