Our little Blue Wheaten Ameracauna, Mia, was hatched by Ellie nearly a month ago. She is three weeks old in these pictures. I'm not sure why the other eight eggs she was sitting on didn't hatch. They were shipped from Maryland and trying to hatch shipped eggs is always a gamble. Also, we had a heat wave here the last week of the hatch with temps in the high 90's. In an incubator you must be careful to keep the temperature above 99, but prolonged heat above 103 can kill the developing chicks. It's possible that under the hen and in the unventilated nest box the eggs simply overheated. So we consider little Mia a survivor, and Ellie is being a good mom and teaching her all things chicken. They have their own pen, but they are beside Izzie and her five week old babies and spend a lot of time watching them through the fence.
Ellie had been joining Izzie in the nest box to lay her eggs and Izzie was fine with this at first. Every day I just removed Ellie's egg and pulled her off the nest to run with the flock. As Izzie got closer to her due date, she was becoming a little distressed with Ellie's intrusion. One day, instead of putting Ellie on the ground to join her peeps, I plopped her into an adjoining nest box. When she stayed there for several days, I ordered her some eggs. Mia will join Ranger, a Wheaten cockerel, and Sophie and Ophelia, the two Blue Wheaten pullets when I split up the four groups by breed at or near point of lay-sometime early spring.
