Mrs. Schmidt’s Egg
We are hatching 11 Chocolate Laced Orpington’s in our classroom. We started our eggs on 5/4/26 and it will take 21 days for these eggs to hatch. Day 21 will be on Memorial Day so we will have the incubators home here on the farm that weekend and will give updates here!
This was our day 5 egg progressing nicely!
5/21/26- today is day 18! We picked up the incubators from the classrooms today to bring them home to hatch over the weekend. Today being day 18 means we also lock down the incubator. This means that we don’t open it again until they have hatched and increase the humidity to help enable the chicks to be able to get out of their eggs easily. I candled the eggs one more time and I took one out that had not continued to develop which leave 8 eggs total to hatch! I will be putting updates here over the weekend as things happen!!!
Friday 5/22/26 Nothing to update from overnight no pips or chicks yet. There are actually two kinds:
- Internal pip — the chick breaks through the membrane into the air cell inside the egg and takes its first breaths. We cannot see the internal pips.
- External pip — the chick finally cracks through the shell so you can see a tiny hole or crack from the outside.
After the external pip, the chick usually rests for quite a while (sometimes 12–24+ hours) before it “zips” around the shell and pushes out completely. That resting time is normal — they’re absorbing the last of the yolk and recovering from hard work. A healthy pip often looks like:
- a tiny star crack
- a small triangle-shaped hole
- sometimes you can hear peeping before you see it
One important thing: once a chick pips, humidity becomes really important. Opening the incubator too much can dry the membrane out and make hatching harder (“shrink wrapping” the chick).
Saturday 5/23/26 – By day 19, your chick is usually already positioned with its beak tucked under its right wing and pointed toward the air cell — it’s basically in its hatching launch position. The chick has spent days practicing tiny breathing motions and swallowing amniotic fluid, getting ready for its first real breaths.
Around this stage, many chicks are also using a temporary little tool called an egg tooth (a tiny hard bump on the end of the beak). They’ll use that special “tool” to pip the shell… and then they lose it a few days after hatching! A couple of you mentioned this and I thought it was only ducks but I was wrong
This is also the stage where eggs can sometimes start making tiny peeps or wiggles if you watch closely enough. Tiny dinosaurs in training.
I’ll be sure to post pictures and video as soon as any eggs pip!
Sunday 5/24/26 There were two pups overnight!
Sunday PM update- 1 egg hatched, 4 more viable pips. I can’t see all the eggs once the chick hatches because they tend to rearrange the eggs a lot.
Monday 5/25/26 – “There’s chickens every!” I woke up to 3 more baby chicks from your incubator! I wasn’t able to get a good video of them hatching but I’ll include one of them moving in the incubator like baby dinosaurs. This brings your total chicks to four and we are still waiting on some to hatch as today is technically hatch day!
Monday Evening update- what a day! Out of 8 eggs 6 have hatched, one is in in progress hatching and I think the last one may not hatch we will see. I will update here again in the am with an update in the eggs we are waiting on.
Tuesday 5/26/26 – The last two eggs one did not hatch and I don’t see any movement when I candle the egg so I don’t believe this egg is going to hatch. The other egg did hatch however it’s not doing very well so we will see how it does through the day.
Wednesday 5/27/26 – The last egg that hatched I don’t believe formed properly inside the egg. The chick was unable to stand, had a deformed foot and something wasn’t quite right with its abdomen. Sadly this chick did not survive. Out of your 8 eggs we left in the incubator to hatch 6 hatched perfectly and are doing great!!