Hatch Two - Day Four Egg Candling

Last night, after I finished with my canning, I candled the seven new eggs in the incubator to check for fertilization and/or progress. This would be the first candling of this batch. At this point, you are looking for a "spider" appearance of blood vessels within the egg. This is sometimes hard to see with darker eggs at this early stage. I put the first egg in the Brinsea Ovascope Egg Viewer. YES! I could see the spidering effect:


(You may have to enlarge the picture to see it.)

This is a medium-sized white egg so visualization is a bit easier.

Egg #2 is a blue-green egg laid by one of our "Easter Eggers". This breed of chicken is really cute with its muffs and beards. I am curious to know which rooster's characteristics will go along with this chick. Anyway, I put egg #2 under the viewer and it looked like this:



Not to bore you with photos of all seven eggs, I will give you the run down thus far:

Egg 1: Fertile and developing
Egg 2: Fertile and developing
Egg 3: Fertile and developing
Egg 4: Unsure. This is "big bird's" (a Rhode Island Red) egg and due to the shell colour, I can't say for sure. I will recheck on day 7 as it will be more apparent. Ironically enough, I was unsure about #4 in our last batch as well and that ended up being Nemo!
Egg 5: Fertile and developing
Egg 6: Fertile and developing
Egg 7: Unsure. This is a Copper Maran's egg with a dark brown shell. Like egg #4, I will try to make a better determination on day 7.

So there you have it - the latest on the 7 eggs in the incubator. I checked on Mama Duck yesterday and she is still sitting strong on the 12 or so eggs in the duckhouse. I also have 4 muscovy eggs from another farm that are due to hatch around the same time, so it will be "out of the brooder" with the present chicks and "into the brooder" with up to 23 new chicks/ducklings in about 17 days.

Have a fantabulous day!
:o) jenn