On Saturday, the quail eggs placed in the incubator on July 1 began to hatch! By 3pm, we had 4 hatchlings. By 10pm, we had 11 hatched babies and one pecking and chirping in the egg. By Sunday afternoon, the 11 babies were dry and fluffy and we moved them from incubator to brooder. The children and we decided to issue names according to themes like Star Trek, Star Wars, Wizard of Oz, and others.
We chose Star Trek TOS for this group and gave character names replacing the initial consonant sound with the QU sound. So, our quails were (captain) Quirk, Quock, Quoola, Queckov, Quo'hura, Quottie, Quones, Quike (remember Captain Pike from the first episode?), Quibbles (remember Tribbles?), Quingon, and Quomulan.
We lost 2 babies Sunday night, and #12 never made it out of the incubator. Another baby weakened during the day yesterday, and it was gone this morning. We treated the remaining 8 with Tetracycline, and everyone looks strong and happy this morning. Out of 21 eggs, 6 were infertile, 2 never hatched, 1 hatched and never stood up, and 11 hatched and made it 24 hours. 9 have survived 48 hours and are looking great. We are at just under 50% on our first try with incubating eggs. We began collecting for a new group for the incubator yesterday, and we'll collect through Saturday. I'm going to attempt to post a PhotoStory series of photos of the hatching quail. It was fascinating to watch, and I'll never get over the miracle of new life!
The PhotoStory series didn't upload correctly. I'll keep trying.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment