Question 1

I've never done anything like this before - what if something goes wrong or I am unsure about anything?

Accepted Answer

We understand first time hatchers can find the responsibility of caring for newly hatched living creatures a little nerve-wracking. Full instructions are given when the kit is set up for you. The vast majority of hatches are problem free. However, on occasion a chick or duckling can hatch with problems or questions can arise. We provide a contact number throughout the hire period. With our service you can rest assured you will be supported with expert information and advice if and when needed.

Question 2

Is it safe?

Accepted Answer

Hatching chicks and ducklings is an extremely low risk activity, which simply requires common sense, such as ensuring equipment is positioned safely and general hygiene rules are followed.  
 
All pet animals have the capacity to carry disease, whether a dog, cat, fish, small mammal, reptile or bird. Common sense actions such as good husbandry and washing hands after handling both the animal and droppings will manage this risk. 
 
We provide all settings with a risk assessment during the week prior to the commencement of their booking. This outlines what the supervising adult needs to be aware of, but these risks are minimal. We have full public liability insurance. 
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A note about 'pathogen-free' chicken eggs...
‘Pathogen-free’ is a term often used to describe the status of chicken eggs originating from large, industrial, factory farmed hatcheries. These are intensive, disease-prone environments. This means they require additional health safeguards and labelling to ensure the eggs and birds leaving them are deemed fit to enter the human food chain. 
 
Although these ‘pathogen-free’ eggs are readily available cheaply by the thousands and used by some hatching providers in their hatching kits, we choose not to source our chicken eggs from these types of highly intensive units. This is for both ethical and practical reasons: the parent birds are not kept in the natural manner to which we subscribe and hatched birds are of such little economic value compared to pure or rare breeds that they are sadly very difficult to rehome after the hatching experience is over.
 
The risk of catching a disease from birds raised in traditional, low-intensity farm settings is deemed so small that the eggs our birds produce are not subject to the same certification as that of a factory farm. We are proud that our birds are not reared in the category of environment which legally requires these additional health safeguards to ensure our eggs are safe. As smallholders have done for centuries, and as people in every civilisation do on a daily basis across the globe, we eat eggs from our own birds - straight from the field! We also supply free range eggs for human consumption to local people wishing to avoid factory farmed products. 
 
It is of course up to individual teachers and managers to decide which method of farming they would rather support; intensive factory farms or ethical, low-intensity, high-welfare producers. The eggs themselves may look similar when incubating in your classroom or nursing home, but as with eating eggs and chicken sold in shops and supermarkets, there are enormous differences between how the two came to be. 
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Please visit ‘About Us’ to see our practices for yourself - we very much doubt those hatching providers using factory farmed 'pathogen-free' chicken eggs will be willing to do the same!
 
All chicken AND duck eggs used in our hatching kits are from DEFRA registered flocks where applicable.

Question 3

Don't the eggs need turning?

Accepted Answer

All our eggs are incubated in professional incubators prior to arrival, where they are automatically turned, and temperature and humidity is constantly monitored and accurately controlled. In the final days of incubation, the eggs should no longer be turned. This is when we deliver your eggs, so there is no need for you to rotate the eggs any further. With natural incubation, a mother bird would also stop turning the eggs. This is to allow the hatchling to position and orientate itself to hatch. On delivery we will show you how to monitor the temperature in the incubator, and how to easily maintain the high levels of humidity required in these final stages.

Question 4

Don't baby birds need a mother?

Accepted Answer

A mother hen nurturing her chicks or a mother duck with her ducklings is a very natural and wonderful sight. However, it is a little known fact that many domestic chicken and duck breeds never - or very rarely - 'go broody', which is the hormonal state they need to reach in order to sit and incubate their own eggs. Although they lay lots of eggs, these eggs would simply never hatch unless they were incubated by other means. Many of our fabulous old heritage breeds would therefore very quickly become extinct. Even with breeds which do 'go broody', only a tiny fraction of the eggs they produce each year are ever hatched naturally by their mother into chicks or ducklings. If nature were left to its own devices, there would be far fewer chickens or ducks on the planet than there are now - certainly nowhere near enough to satisfy our demands for eggs and meat. This is why humans have been incubating eggs since at least Ancient Egyptian times. 
Unlike mammals, the offspring of poultry do not feed from their parents, so their needs can quite easily be met by humans.

Question 5

Why do so many domestic breeds never want to rear their own young?

Accepted Answer

In the same way that all domestic dog breeds are thought to have descended from wolves, all chicken breeds are descended from a wild bird known as Red Junglefowl. All duck breeds are descendants of either wild Mallards or Muscovies. Once these wild birds have laid a clutch of eggs, they go broody, incubate them and then rear their young. It's thought that we humans started to domesticate poultry for our own use about 8000 years ago. We began to develop new breeds and wanted birds which produced more eggs and were less inclined to 'go broody', because broodiness stops egg production. This was achieved by selectively breeding the best layers, who were also less prone to broodiness. Over time the number of eggs domestic breeds could produce far outnumbered that of any wild bird, whilst their instinct to incubate their own eggs declined. Eventually this instinct was simply bred out of some breeds altogether. To illustrate: The Red Junglefowl - the bird from which all domestic chicken breeds are descended - lays an average of 8-12 eggs a year. In comparison, a Rhode Island Red (a breed of chicken developed in the nineteenth century) can lay about 250 eggs a year! However, the hens do not go broody. This means the breeds very survival depends entirely upon other means of egg incubation. Rhode Island Reds are just one of the many pure breeds we preserve here at Incredible Eggs - the eggs of which are often included in our hatching kits!

Question 6

Should we hatch chicks, ducklings or partridges?"

Accepted Answer

Due to their different sizes and needs, we do not mix different species eggs within the same kit, although you are of course free to hire different kits at the same time for the ultimate hatching experience! There are links at the top of the homepage with points to consider when making your choice.

Question 7

How many eggs come in the Kits?

Accepted Answer

We provide approximately 7 eggs in our chick hatching kits.
 
Due to their large size and the speed of their growth, we supply 5 eggs in our duckling hatching kits. 
 
We provide approximately 10 eggs in our partridge kits.

Question 8

How many can we expect to hatch?

Accepted Answer

Hatch rates vary, but you can expect a hatch rate of between 4-7 chicks, 3-5 ducklings and 5-10 partridges.

Question 9

What happens to the birds over the weekend during the hire period?

Accepted Answer

We recommend that a responsible adult takes the kit and the hatchlings home over the weekend, unless someone is available on site to tend to them. The kit is fully portable and fits in the back of a car. Please ensure car heating is turned up for the journey!

Question 10

We are a 'pack-away' setting. Can we take part?

Accepted Answer

The incubator is about the size of a football and needs to be undisturbed with an uninterrupted electricity supply until the baby birds have hatched in approximately 2-3 days after delivery. It should only be very carefully moved a very short distance, for example to the room next door. The whole operation becomes much more portable once the birds have hatched and have then been moved to the brooding cage, where they will live for the rest of the hire period. It is then possible to move them over greater distances, although the brooding plate should only be left unplugged for about 20 minutes, or the hatchlings will get cold. We recommend that a responsible adult takes the kit and the hatchlings home over the weekend, unless someone is available on site to tend to them. The kit is fully portable and fits in the back of a car. Please ensure car heating is turned up for the journey!

Question 11

Who owns the birds which hatch from the eggs we have purchased?

Accepted Answer

All birds which hatch from the eggs purchased as part of hire kits are the property and responsibility of The Customer who made the purchase (The school, nursery, care home or individual in the case of private bookings). Young birds are small and very appealing and it is tempting to want to keep them. However, they do not stay this way for long! They grow a lot bigger and need ongoing care and attention, as well as the correct facilities. They are a long term commitment and ownership should not be embarked upon lightly. We provide The Customer with information and a checklist, so that they can make an informed decision about the suitability of any third parties who wish to keep the birds after the hire period. This decision will rest with The Customer. If suitable homes are unavailable, The Customer may sign ownership of the birds over to Incredible Eggs at the end of the hire period and they will be collected along with the hire equipment.
Incredible Eggs does not support the rehoming of birds hatched from the eggs we have sold with animal sanctuaries or rescue centres. These organisations are often already over-stretched and working with limited resources, which should be kept available for genuine animal welfare cases. Your Incredible Eggs branch has the necessary facilities and experience in place to responsibly accommodate all birds hatched, should you wish to sign ownership over to us at the end of the hire period.

Question 12

What happens to the birds after they leave if we choose to sign ownership over to Incredible Eggs?

Accepted Answer

Not all hatching providers are created equal! There has been some recent bad press and concerns raised involving some school hatching providers. Our setting's testimonials leave us in no doubt of the enormous educational and emotional value the hatching experience brings to those involved, but at the end of the hire period there are new lives which need to be responsibly cared for. 
It has become apparent that some providers may not have both the necessary expertise or facilities in place to ensure that this is the case. Please choose your provider with care.
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The welfare of our birds is of paramount importance to us and we take our responsibilities seriously. We are established, reputable small-scale poultry breeders and conservationists in our own right and are passionate about what we do, with standards that are extremely high. Birds signed over to us at the end of the hire period from settings which have chosen not to embark on poultry keeping or who have not managed to find suitable homes are grown on in spacious, warm, carefully maintained accommodation. This is kept clean and well-ventilated. They are ready to go outside at about eight weeks of age.  As poultry breeders, we provide a local service by supplying poultry enthusiasts and smallholders with quality livestock. We are advocates of 'old school', low intensity traditional smallholder farming methods - as close as possible to what nature intended. We NEVER sell more hatching eggs than we can comfortably accommodate as birds after the hire period is over.
 
It is important to have a realistic, basic understanding of farming when embarking on ANY poultry hatching project and we are honest and transparent about our practices. If we find we have an unhealthy ratio of cockerels to hens and our hens are suffering as a result, it is sometimes necessary to control the number of males through humane culling. This is a reality which those who have limited knowledge of poultry keeping sometimes find shocking. However, it is a very necessary practice to ensure the overall health and well-being of a flock. This has been the case for thousands of years, ever since poultry first became domesticated, and is indeed true for almost all species of farmed animals. Some of our ducks and on occasion, some of our chickens may be raised as table birds. They enjoy a first-rate quality of life. 
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 If the rearing of animals for food or the culling of excess cockerels is something you find unacceptable, regardless of how ethically it may be practiced, Incredible Eggs is not the hatching provider for you.
Please visit our 'About Us' page for further individual branch information.