I went and checked on the duck on the peninsula (Nanny) who's sitting on goose eggs. No babies yet. She had kicked two eggs out of the nest and candling them I can see they appeared to have been fertile but are dead now. I wonder if they were bad so she kicked them out, or if they died because they got kicked out. Either way, she has six under her still.
I've got one duck and one chicken in the fridge to thaw from the ones we sent to the butcher place last fall. I want to try out a new Pampered Chef stoneware cooking thing I got recently. It should fit both (very small) birds at once. I'll have to prepare some side dishes to make sure we're all fed. I'm thinking sweet potatoes and green beans. I'll have to see what Tony can pick up from the store on his way home from work tomorrow.
We continue to have no less than four broody hens, and the other hens (and two ducks) continue to sneak into those nests to lay more eggs. As soon as eggs hatch and chickens get up, I think we'll just mass deposit all the remaining eggs into the incubator to catch any slow hatchers or half incubated eggs. In the meantime, I don't really have any more eggs available to sell as hatching eggs. I have no way to know which ones are fresh and which are partially incubated without marking them all, and the one shared nest with two broody hens was up to 22 eggs a couple days ago. I don't want to risk getting pecked to start marking them now.
We have two little chicks and a third hatching in the incubator now. One of them is white with a little bit of dark over the head and down the back. Adorable. The silver-legged chick from one of the original hatches has finally started to grow tail feathers and it looks like a hen! I'm so excited! It came from a blue egg and was hatched when Doodle (French Black Copper Marans) was still the flock rooster, which means there's a good chance if it's a hen, she'll be an olive-egger.
I need to do better at taking photos, but when it's hard for me to just get through my daily routine, sometimes just getting the blog posted is a feat in and of itself. I'll try to take more photos so there won't be so many "naked" posts without pictures to spice them up.