Surprise Tuesday Picy Post :) (thumb size, click for full size)

First off, I'm rocking the cutest hand-knit socks, courtesy of wild_heart and they fit perfectly!



I'm also collecting a gorgeous variety of eggs, tiny little bantam cochin egg on the left all the way through to the large Swede egg on the right:



Or perhaps, you'd prefer it presented cyclically? Duck egg at 12 o'clock, bantam in the middle:



How tiny is it? The size of a Rocher!

Day 8: Incubation Update (1/3 of the way!)

Much to Libby's dismay, as she has dedicated herself to supervising the incubator, I've just finished candling all 48 light brown silkie eggs. There's 4 eggs I'm fairly sure are duds, though for a variety of reasons.

Egg #1: Lots of speckling, aka bright pinpoints that indicate the egg shell is too thin and very porous. It may still hatch, however.
Egg #2: No air cell, likely means the egg wasn't fertilized.
Egg #3: Green. Just oddly green. Martian egg? Non-performer, in any case.
Egg #4: Red ring, aka bacterial growth likely. Typically means it wasn't fertilized and the incubation temps are aiding the rotting of the egg. If not removed in time, they can explode. Stinky and messy!

At Day 8, the chick embryos will have developed a beak, the buds that will become their wings and feet have separated into digits. Little holes in their skin will soon allow feathers to begin to poke through. The egg tooth is beginning to form. Ideally, I'd be able to see the "spider", aka embryo growth. The dark spot in the center is the embryo's eye(s) developing which was identifiable by Day 3. The spider's legs are actually blood veins reaching out to encase the inner membrane layer of the egg. Later on, should the chick hit one of these veins while pipping, the chick will bleed out or drown in its own blood. Very sad, we had that happen last time at hatching.

In most of them though what we can see right now is a well-developed air sack, reaching down from the rounded end of the egg at a diagonal (the angle of which will tell you development stage), a bit of a dark spot of eye development and a few veins.

Will try for pictures and update this if possible. So far, the damn flash is making anything useful impossible to get!

Its a bit obscure, but you can feel a bit of thrumming energy from a good egg. With duck eggs, I can usually hear the heartbeat about now, but with these tiny Silkie eggs its harder as everything is so much smaller. With these, there's just the slightest pulsation - an impossibly soft wooshing that's more sensation than hearing at present. I can't even be sure its the egg and not my own blood flow somehow magnified by the idiocy of my sticking an egg in my ear. :)