Candling Eggs in the Incubator

I tried to get a good photo shoot with our little peeps in the incubator, but they prove to be a little difficult to photograph within the shell!  ha ha.  We went onto YouTube and found some great videos of people testing their eggs for fertility around day 5 and also what the chick embryo looks like around Day 11. I highly recommend doing that yourself.
So we took our little eggs into my darkened bedroom, used a flashlight shining out from a cardboard box/tube to focus the light on the egg. Later on I just used the little "Mag Lite" flashlight in my hand and threw away the box.  Much easier.  We looked quite funny all under my blankets looking at eggs!

This is day 11, you can see an obvious air sac at the bottom, then a dark circle (eye ball) and then the rest is darkened.  This one was moving around!  The darkened is the little chick.

To the middle right you can see a darkened line, that is actually the beginning of a chick!  Like a human ultrasound, it's a spine.

See the dark blob circle?  That is an eye ball and chick forming around day 8

This is one of the little wee bantam eggs around day 5.  Definite blob,eye, and vessels.

We checked all the eggs that we had started March 17th on March 28th.  We threw away 5 eggs.  2 eggs had not done anything, so infertile.  3 had started, then died.  They had an obvious darkened red ring around the blob...they say that happens sometimes because of the incubator.

We actually saw some chicks moving back and forth inside the eggs!  It was so cool!  I tried to video tape it, but my camera abilities don't do it.  If you stop by I'll try to show you one!  God is so good.

Below is another incubator the Hova-Bator...it gently rotates the eggs back and forth and keeps a pretty even temperature.  We started these eggs on March 23rd, but unfortunately I'm not seeing a lot going on in these eggs yet.  Some seem completely clear, a few shows signs of having a darkened area.  The white bantam eggs in here are showing great stuff!  One egg we had was super large, but only 1 yoke, so we started it and we can see it is fertile and has started to develop.

See the huge egg on the bottom left?  It's working, even though I've put it on the mesh because it wouldn't let the thing rotate!  If this big egg hatches out, we said we're naming it Kris, from a friend's older brother... 

he's a tall one and the girls like to tease.  If it's a hen, maybe it will be Kris-tina or Kris-tie...