A belated Merry Christmas!

I don't know if anyone remembers me mentioning just after Christmas that one of the silkie X's I'd bought for broodies went broody just in time for me to slip the last few partridge wyandotte eggs laid under her. I'd joked it was a lovely Christmas present - joked because this was on the day we hit 40 degrees and over the next week we also had disgustingly hot weather so I thought for sure the eggs would be write-offs. I left them under her mostly to keep her broody in case I found some more eggs to slip under her.

Well... guess what I just found when I went out to check on her this morning?

A little bitty face peeking out, still a bit damp. I was pretty chuffed at one chick, far more than I expected out of that batch! (Erm... actually I was worried they'd explode and was thinking of turfing them to exchange for plastic dummy eggs.) So I carefully lifted her off to check and found three more!

I figured I was on a roll and checked the rest of the eggs. Did I dare hope for 1 or 2 more?

The rest of the eggs are *all* pipping or tapping away so fingers crossed (knocking on wood, rubbing horseshoes etc etc) we should have a 100% hatch out of these! The pic above is a little beak poking through the hole in the membrane/shell and the white blip at the bottom of the hole is the eggtooth. At last check there were six babies and two more pipping. We even caught this little one making it's way into the world just as it tumbled out of it's shell and discovered the law of gravity.

They really are much, much cuter once they fluff up eh?

I'm shocked that this is a 100% hatch. First because their mum (Penny) definitely wasn't broody and the fellow who incubated the last lot was on holidays I was upset thinking I'd no choice but to turf them when I really, really need to build numbers. Then after the minor miracle of Lily the Silkie X going broody, the heat hit and if it was 42-43 outside, I shudder to think what that shed was my attempts to keep it relatively cool aside! Not to mention having great fertility this late in the season when earlier the fertility was a less than stellar 45-50% fertile at 8 days is just weird! I am *making* myself behave and not go peek at these babies until tomorrow to give everyone a chance to dry off and settle in. Meanwhile Lily is doing a great job being mum and is definitely protective of her little brood!