Tuesday April 22 our friend and neighbor Brad Meyer of Meyer Mountain Farms continued to help us construct our new coop. On this day we put the metal roofing on,
Brad Meyer screwing the first piece of metal roofing in place
marked the siding where the opening to the nesting boxes will be,
Marking the location where the opening to the nesting boxes will be.
cut out the opening for the nesting boxes,
Brad is using a circular saw set 1/4 " depth to cut out the siding.
and framed up the nesting boxes.
Attaching 2" x4" lumber across studs around nesting box opening
Constructing the rest of the nesting box frame
Gerald lifts the framed lid on the framed nesting box.
There is still a lot of work to do but we will be on our own from here. Brad is a good teacher when we finish the nesting box and start on the second one we will see if we are good students.
In a previous post I talked about buying an incubator and saving eggs for hatching. We managed to collect 48 clean medium sized nicely shaped eggs and put them into the incubator today (April 22 2009). For several days we monitored the temperature and the humidity in the incubator to make sure that we had the thermostat set correctly and the correct amount of water available in the reservoir. The temperature holds steady between 99.5oC and 100.5oC but we had some trouble maintaining a relative humidity of 60 to 62 %. We thought we had the humidity correct this morning but after putting the eggs in the humidity inside the incubator rose to 70%. I opened the vents to allow warm moist air to escape and went to work. We shall see what happened when we get home.
If all goes well our chicks will begin to hatch 21 days from now on May 13 2009. Since we have a commercial order for chicks in and are expecting them to arrive May 11th we should be able to integrate any of our chicks which hatch successfully with the flock of bard rock chicks coming from Murray McMurray Hatchery and brood them all together.
