Chicken babies, that is (though it sometimes feels that we have human babies everywhere as well despite there being only two of them). We recently hatched some chicks in our incubator. These will join the eight six-week-old chicks we bought from the local hardware store (they were 50% off and we couldn’t resist despite how busy our lives already were) and the eleven adult chickens we already have.

Why so many chickens? Mr. BBB recently started on a slow-carb diet to try and shed some of his pregnancy weight (yes, men can gain weight during pregnancy as well. Apparently, that should have been my first clue that we were having girls). Because of this, he’s eating quite a few eggs and a lot of meat. Both of these are expensive when buying them from the store, especially when you try to buy everything local and organic like we do. In addition, though it will be a few months yet, the girls will eventually be eating more than milk and will need other sources of protein. Given the amount of time it takes for chickens to begin laying, we decided it was best to start trying to increase the flock size now.

So how do we turn something that seems suitable only for scrambling into its own productive member of chicken society? Honestly, it’s pretty easy. Certainly much easier than raising human babies. The first thing you need is a way to hatch them. You have two options for this: a broody hen or an incubator. A broody hen is a hen willing to sit on the eggs and turn them at appropriate intervals until they hatch. Some breeds are more prone to this than others, so if you are interested in hatching eggs this way, I would recommend trying to get one of those breeds. We have had a few hens over the years who go broody and do sit on the eggs for a little while, but they always seem to abandon them after a couple days. So we have chosen to use an incubator instead.

Basically, an incubator keeps the eggs at the right temperature (99°F-102°F, ideally 99.5°F) and humidity (50-55%).You also need to find a way to make sure the eggs are turned at least twice a day. Though you can do this manually, many people opt for an automatic turner to make their lives simpler and eliminate a task they’re likely to forget. This is the option we pursued. After much research, we bought the Hovabator incubator and the automatic egg turner that goes with it. For us, this was a good compromise incubator. It wasn’t one of the tiny ones that only lets you start six eggs, but it also wasn’t a thousand-dollar monstrosity either. My biggest complaint about this incubator is that it’s basically a Styrofoam box with heating element and measuring equipment in the lid. So it’s not the sturdiest. The good news is that it’s held up so far, however.

With an incubator, hatching chicks is pretty easy. Here’s what we did:

1. Place fertilized eggs in the automatic egg turner. You can technically “candle” eggs to check if they are fertilized but I won’t go into that here since we’ve never done it. We have a couple roosters, so we just assume our eggs are fertilized. And if they’re not, they just won’t hatch.
2. Fill the number one trough in the bottom tray with water (I found that this actually put the humidity at closer to 60% in our relatively moist Midwest climate, so if you live somewhere with high humidity, you may want to start by filling one of the smaller troughs)
3. Close the lid of the incubator and plug everything in.
4. Check on it every two days or so to make sure the temperature and humidity are still good. Add water as needed (i.e. if the trough is looking pretty empty)
5. On day 18, increase the humidity to 65% or so (we do this by filling a second trough in the incubator) and turn off the automatic egg turner.

That’s it! After about 21 days of incubation, you should have some brand new chicks. For some reason, the majority of ours always seem to hatch a couple days early though we have had some hatch on day 21. We have never had any hatch after this point though. Others might have different experiences, but I would recommend checking at least once a day starting on day 18 or so.

Also, don’t help the chicks out of the egg shell once it’s cracked. It can take up to twenty-four hours for a chick to get out of the shell, and you can easily cause it to bleed to death if you aren’t careful. If you are really worried, try increasing the humidity. The chick may be stuck in a dried up membrane.

Once your chicks hatch, you need somewhere to put them. The appropriate term for this is “brooder” though you can call it whatever you like (we call ours the chick box since we weren’t feeling very creative. The coop itself was christened by one of our friends as “Fort Clucks” which is a much more apt and creative name). We use the largest plastic storage container we could find at the hardware store lined with empty chicken feed bags and pine chips. You could also use newspaper. This is actually a hotly debated topic among the chicken raising community. Some people claim that newspaper/feed bags will cause them to slip and get spraddle leg (where the legs are splayed laterally) so you should use pine chips. Others claim they’ll eat the pine chips and kill themselves that way. Honestly, we have not had either problem. The pine chips are probably too big for them to attempt eating anyway, and the paper isn’t that slippery. Within this brooder/tub/box, you should have water in something that they cannot drown in. We got a plastic poultry drinker like this for this purpose, but I’ve heard a small dish with rocks works too. However, given how dirty the water gets even in the small open area of ours, I would caution that you might be cleaning those rocks a lot. You also need a feeder. We got this one from our hardware store. I like it better than the bucket feeder for little chicks (our big chickens have a hanging bucket feeder) though they still somehow manage to pack it full of pine chips as they get older so you have to clean it out regularly. It will also rust if you accidentally leave it outside for 6+ months (not that we ever did that. . . ) so I would recommend taking better care of it than we have.

You will also need a heat lamp. Chicks are supposed to be at 95 degrees the first week of life and 5 degrees less each week thereafter. Honestly, I’ve never measured to try and get it exact. I hang a heat lamp about a foot above the bottom of the brooder. If they all crowd under it, I assume they’re too cold and lower it. If they spread out as far from it as they can go, I assume they’re too hot and raise it. It’s worked well so far. I would also recommend a red light bulb instead of a white one (we get the red 250W heat lamp bulbs). They seem to be less annoyed by the red light (or at least peck at each other less). Honestly, I can’t blame them—I wouldn’t want a bright light shining on me 24/7 either. We hang our light from a chain attached to a wooden support that my husband built a few years ago (it was originally intended to be a homemade monitor stand for his standing desk but was ultimately too tall). It’s just a 2×4 frame with a piece of plywood on top so it’s relatively easy to build if you want (you could even forgo the plywood if you’re building this solely as a light support). When we need to raise it and run out of chain, we just add cement blocks under the legs.

The last thing you may want to consider is some wire mesh for the top of the brooder if your brooder is in a place with mice like ours is. Turns out, mice like chicken food too. And that’s it! As you can see from the picture, our “brooder’ is pretty simple (we set it up in less than an hour). I would still recommend having it ready within the first week after you put the eggs in the incubator. You really don’t want to have a bunch of newborn chicks and suddenly realize that your heat lamp isn’t working.