This is little Petunia.  She is our first little Mille Fleur D’uucle Banty Chick.

She just hatched about 1 am.   She’s been working on hatching for almost 6 hours or more…  it’s when she made her first big beak crack and we could hear her chirping!  Yep, through the shell…  so sweet!

She’s still really fragile right now, but she’s made it through the roughest part of the journey…  she’s still got to absorb her little leftover yolk sack in her tummy, and of course, warm up and dry off.  Next couple hours, she should be up and active.  I took a nap this afternoon, so I might stay up and watch.

The rest of them are active, at least 5 more, perhaps 7.  We candled them last night and about 10 were clear and duds.  I wish there would have been more, but for some reason, I think our eBay adventure is going to produce a fairly low hatch rate.  The Marans eggs are looking iffy, a lot are clear, which means the chick just failed to develop.  It’s hard to tell because the shells are so dark, but you can pretty quickly see the ones that don’t look good.  They have another week to go.  Unfortunately, the Jersey Giants we ordered don’t look good at all.  I’m so sad!   They are the ones my neighbors ordered.  They almost all look clear!  I am going to contact the seller and I hope that maybe we can work out a deal to get another batch shipped out.  I totally understand they only guarantee uncracked eggs and she really did a fantastic job of packing them, but we’re so sad that they all seem to have been either unfertilized, or had gotten scanned or heated in a truck, something and just failed to develop.  Since we are getting other chicks to hatch in the same batch, I don’t think it’s an incubator failure.  We’ll see.  She’s got great feedback so I’m sure we can work something out.

I have been asking Maggie to set aside the nicest darkest of our own flock Marans to get started in the incubator!  Might as well!  Our little homegrown babies out in the teen shack are doing fantastic and I’m pretty sure we have at least two purebred blue copper marans from the two batches, perhaps three!  I guess we will just develop our own wonderful Marans from our delightful Bucka Roo bloodlines!

Well, off to check the little baby Petunia!   I’m going to name them all after flowers, since the breed is named for the French… Million Flowers!