Last night, we candled the eggs. I had a total of 37 eggs to start with, thinking that a lot of them probably wouldn't be viable and hoping that in the end we'd end up with a dozen or so chicks.
One egg was a "quitter": an egg whose embryo started to develop, then died early on. Those have an obvious "blood ring" visible but no blood vessels. And there were two or three eggs that had a thick and/or dark shell that didn't let me see inside. But it looks like those roosters have been pretty busy, because of the eggs I could see into, I couldn't find any that
hadn't been fertilized. Aside from the quitter, they all had the tell-tale web of blood vessels developing with a dark little blob in the midst of them.
The photo below isn't clear enough to see the blood vessels, but you can see the dark embryo blob. In some of the eggs, we could even see the blob moving. (
Click here to see a pretty cool video of a candled egg. It's amazing.)
So at this point, we have
at least 33 eggs with obvious embryos inside. It's still not a sure thing that they will hatch, but I'm almost worried that we'll have more chicks than I was hoping for. I guess I need to get busy building that chicken plucker.
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