Chick Diary: H-14 Candling success

To my inexperienced eye, it’s taken me a whole week so come up with a confirmed fertile egg sighting. Well it could just be my inexperienced eye, or it could just be my makeshift candling methods or it could just be sheer impatience. But when you see your little chick bobbing up and down inside the egg – well! What a proud moment!
The method I Use for candling is as follows:

1. Get a dark room. (Haha, I’m so funny I crack myself up – crack up? Eggs? Oh, well if you don’t get it forget it)

2. Use a bright torch – I have an LED based head torch, which seems to work well. Just use as bright a torch as you can get hold of, it will make identifying good and bad eggs easier.

3. Pinch your thumb and ring finger together to form a divers ‘ok’ sign (difficult to explain so I have included a picture).

4. Remove your egg from the incubator and sit it on top of the ‘ring’ you made with your thumb and ring finger. Don’t worry about the eggs being out of the incubator – its harmless to your little chick and the eggs can be out of the incubator for up to half an hour without a problem.

5. Place your torch underneath the ‘ring’ and the egg so the only light coming through to your eyes will have to be through the egg.

6. If the egg has a live chick inside then you should see a small, dark dot inside the egg with like a spiders legs vein pattern coming from the dot. If you’re lucky and the chick has grown a little more you may see it wriggling and wobbling inside the egg.

At the moment I don’t have any pictures to show you of what a live egg should look like – but I will try to set my good camera up tonight to see if I can get some, failing that I will pull some photos off the internet.