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| For our purposes, the egg came first |
We are planning on candling our eggs later today... hopefully, we will capture some great photos to share with all of you!
As a former 4-Her, I may be biased, but a big hooray for the University Extensions!!
Here are some links to great educational sites on chicken emrbyology and life sciences. The print outs we used today (pictured above) are featured on the "Incubation and Embryology" page of the University of Illinois Extension Website. This page offers free related lesson plans, activities and a resource list.
For some great photos and videos of chicks and chicken embryos, visit the University of Nebraska-Lancaster Extension Website. This site even includes a live egg cam! Their current chicks started pipping last night, so we got to watch some great live hatching video today.
For all things chicken related, including a very active forum of other chicken-raisers, I recommend visiting The Backyard Chicken Website. From "Chicken Raising 101", to advice on surgically treating chickens with bumblefoot... this site HAS IT ALL.
Finally, if you plan to keep the chicks that hatch, you are going to need a safe and comfortable place to keep them. For images of chicken tractors/coops to give you ideas for building your own, check out TheCityChickens' Chicken Tractor Gallery. Since backyard chicken raising is a current fad, it is nearly impossible to find good "free" chicken tractor/coop plans online. If you know of some, please post a link! With a little know-how, and a lot of creativity, one can come up with some plans of your own. I'll be sure to post some photos of our coop-building. Hoping Wade gets to sketching up the final plans this weekend!
Tip of the day....I wouldn't recommend using YouTube to search for videos related to chicken hatching, unless you do so without your children present. Trust me on this.
