The most exciting part of the incubation process can also be the most traumatic if you don't know what you're doing.  This final post in the lunchtime series tells you what to expect during hatch time, but the 99 cent ebook from which the post is drawn covers much more information.  I hope you'll splurge a buck if you want to learn more about preparing for the hatch, helping chicks out of the shell, troubleshooting incubation problems, and getting your youngsters off to a healthy start.

You'll probably see at least one chick pipping (pecking the initial hole into its shell) on day 19 or 20.  I like to record the date and time each egg pips to give me an indication of whether chicks are having trouble.  I explain how and when to help chicks in another section, but for now, just be aware that it's very normal to see a delay of 8 to 12 hours between pipping and unzipping (when the chick severs the blunt end of the shell and breaks its way free).  But if a chick has pipped but not begun to unzip 24 hours later, it might be in trouble.

If you've done a good job with all of the early incubation steps, your chicks will probably pop right out of their shells one after another with no help from you.  Some manuals recommend leaving your chicks in the incubator for an entire day without lifting the lid to allow the youngsters to dry off completely, but I've had much better luck plucking chicks out of the incubator within 45 minutes of hatching and either plopping them into the brooder to finish drying off or placing them in a smaller incubator.

The trouble with leaving chicks in the incubator after they hatch is that the baby birds will stumble around madly, rolling eggs and (in the worst case scenario) spearing partially hatched chicks with their claws.  In my experience, newly hatched chicks are upset by not having anything soft to snuggle into, so they keep hopping around even though they're exhausted.  Once I pop a newly hatched chick under our brooder, it stops peeping shrilly and soon falls asleep.

There are two downsides to removing chicks from the incubator one at a time throughout the hatch process.  Chicks come out of the shell soaked to the skin and can easily catch a chill, especially if you're hatching in cold weather.  Forty-five minutes in the incubator is just long enough that the chick's feathers are (mostly) dry, but is not long enough that they puff up into the protective ball of fuzz most of us think of when we envision a chick.  In warm weather (and even in cold weather if there are at least two or three other chicks in the brooder for the newly hatched youngster to snuggle into), this level of dry off is enough.  However, if your first chick comes out of the shell when your room temperature is below about 50 degrees Fahrenheit, you should either put up with the problems caused by leaving the chick in the main incubator until at least one more chick hatches and dries, or should place the newly hatched chick in a spare incubator for a few hours.  You'll be able to tell if you put a too-wet chick into a too-cold brooder because it will keep chirping frantically rather than quieting down after a minute or two.

The other issue with removing chicks from the incubator one by one is that every time you lift the lid, the incubator cools slightly and the humidity levels drop.  You can counteract this problem to some extent with speed --- open the lid with one hand while you snag the chick with the other.  If it's pretty cold in the room, I like to heat up some water until it's steaming and top off the wells when I take off the incubator lid since the hot water will keep the temperature in the incubator high and will also increase the humidity drastically.  Using an evaporating cloth (explained in another section) also helps keep the humidity within the incubator at a high level.

Even though it's not 100% necessary, I open the lid a second time after the new chick is safely ensconced in the brooder, this time to tidy up the interior of the incubator.  I remove large pieces of eggshell so chicks won't cut themselves on the sharp edges and I roll any disturbed eggs over so their pipping holes are facing up.  (Sometimes, a chick will stumble across a neighboring egg and turn that chick face down, which makes it harder for the down-turned chick to hatch.)  Finally, I quickly move eggs around so that ones likely to hatch soonest have a little more open space around their blunt ends.  As with removing the chick, I work quickly to ensure I don't lower the temperature and humidity in the incubator enough that it doesn't rebound a few minutes after I close the lid.

This post is part of our Chicken Incubation lunchtime series.  Read all of the entries: Permaculture Chicken: Incubation Handbook Why incubate? Choosing hatching eggs Filling in the incubator Chicks hatching