Candling eggs

We bought an incubator. Replacements chicks from the hatchery are too expensive and now that I think we have the fox issue under control, at some point our chickens will need to be replaced and I don't want to spend another $4+ per chick to do so. We're just doing a barn yard mix from a friend right now. So far so good. We'll run two of those and pay off the incubator and once we have a rooster old enough, we'll just incubate our own wyandottes.

Rachel and I candled all of the eggs on Monday at day 8. Darker shelled eggs are harder to see through. White eggs are said to be candle-able at about 3 days easily. I checked at day 3 and saw nothing! Day 6 I candled a couple more and saw nothing but an air sac, which is a good sign but I was looking for veins and an eye ball. Some friends came over Sunday and showed me exactly what I was looking for and what do you know, 5 are questionable and 34 are definitely viable, hooray! Rachel and I marked all of them depending on what we thought. We had 8 or so green eggs and I find those VERY difficult to. 2-3 were maran eggs which are like an olive green and it is said the very dark eggs are next to impossible so I stuck a "?" mark on them and we'll see what happens. The light greens are from "Easter Eggers" and the rest are Wyandottes and who knows. I put a few of our own in there too.

It's difficult to get details when it's this dark in the room but the black speck is the growing chick.  If you could see it clearer, one eyeball would be quite a bit darker than the shadow-y part. In person, you can also see veins as well. Pretty neat. Due to hatch March 7!