Exactly 21 days from the time we put eggs into the incubator, 3 fluff balls were born!  Absolutely amazing to watch a food (eggs) turn into a chick.  Four of the eggs were apparently infertile – we broke them open to determine why they didn’t hatch.  But the 3 eggs that did hatch are now week old chicklets living in our bathroom.

The first chicks born here on the farm – just a few hours old and drying off in the incubator.

Now that we’ve figured out how our spiffy new incubator works, we’ll hopefully be starting in earnest to hatch more Javas once the egg production picks back up again. (Egg production  generally drops in winter with the short days unless artificial lighting is added to the coop.) 

The mostly yellow chick on the right is a Mottled Java.  The other two have more black on them and they will grow to be Black Javas.  Of course we had a few chicksn that grew to be non-standard colors called “sport” colors, so these chicks could end up with the even more rare Auburn coloring or the gold coloring that runs in the Mottled flock if they carry those genes from their parents.