From Three to Five

The class project pretty much ended yesterday.  Out of 24 eggs, 5 hatched.  Four out of the five hatches were from Chicken Scratch.  Only one of the eggs that were bought from somewhere else hatched.  That's pretty bad, so I was glad that the mutts pulled through to make the total higher. 

Go Chicken Scratch Mutts!!  WOo hoo!

Four little chicken blobs

The fifth little chicken blob--seemingly being anti-social

In all fairness, one of the mutts isn't.  It actually looks like out of the melange of genetics that went in the incubator, one is actually a full Black Copper Maran.  How we managed that, I have no idea.  Yes, I have the hens and yes, I have the rooster (Peter!), but who woulda thought they'd actually get together?  Most of the time it's a free-for-all out there.  Craziness.

Out of the other 3 mutts, two look just like Persnickety, and one is red.  With a beard.  I have no idea what that's about.  It's going to be interesting to see how that one turns out.

They come home tomorrow.  All in all, I think the kids had a great experience with it--they were a little disappointed at the low hatch rate, but in truth, the incubator went unattended over the weekends, and it did go dry a couple of times.  On top of that, I couldn't vouch for the health of anyone's flock other than my own.  But try explaining that to a large group of 10 year olds.  Either way, I hope they learned a lot.  As for me, I learned that home grown is the best way to go.  I've got some fertile chickens out thar!