Hatching & Brooding Your Own Chicks: Chickens, Turkeys, Ducks, Geese, Guinea Fowl

Gail Damerow shows you how to incubate, hatch, and brood baby chickens, ducklings, goslings, turkey poults, and guinea keets. With advice on everything from selecting a breed and choosing the best incubator to feeding and caring for newborn chicks in a brooder, this comprehensive guide also covers issues like embryo development, panting chicks, and a variety of common birth defects. Whether you want to hatch three eggs or one hundred, you’ll find all the information you need to make your poultry-raising operation a success.

Once a chicken fancier has decided to raise birds for home or commercial markets, a choice arises between buying the chicks or breeding and hatching them oneself. Damerow draws on her own experience for this comprehensive and accessible guide to all matters incubatory. With lots of photographs and plenty of practical data, she outlines parameters for heat, light, feed, and water sources so critical to chicks’ nutrition and growth. She also discusses the hatching process and the diseases that can appear in even the best-managed hatcheries. She explains the mysterious method for determining the little birds’ sex and how to assess their health from body language. Damerow’s guidance embraces not just chickens but also turkeys, ducks, geese, and guinea fowl. Burgeoning interest in locavorism and in humane animal breeding make this a potentially useful addition for library collections in just about all communities, not just for traditional rural institutions. --Mark Knoblauch

"This know-all chicken manual could serve as a college textbook”

“Gail Damerow continues to educate, entertain, and astound us with her detailed coverage of all-things-chicken, this time with seldom-encountered facts and tips on hatching and brooding. ... Add this one to the already long list of Gail Damerow books that belong in every poultry lover’s library.”

“Background information, illustrations, and thorough instructions abound throughout this thoughtfully organized work. In addition to sections devoted to the selection, care, feeding, and development of eggs and chicks, this guide features a glossary and a comprehensive index. … for those seeking reliable instructions on brooding and hatching a variety of fowl, the book is outstanding.”

From Fertilized Egg to Baby Chick and Beyond

Whether you're an experienced poultry owner or an intrigued beginner, chicken expert Gail Damerow offers everything you need to know about acquiring and brooding hatchlings and what to expect from your young charges as they grow. When you've gained experience brooding and are eager for the next challenge, Damerow goes on to explain every step of the hatching process.

If you want your chickens to do the work for you, the chapter on broody hens will prepare you for their special care and feeding needs. If you choose to incubate the eggs, complete coverage of selecting and operating an incubator and understanding the structure and development of an egg will give you the confidence to act as mother hen yourself. And hatching and brooding information on turkeys, ducks, geese, and guinea fowl is also featured.

Gail Damerow has written extensively on raising chickens and other livestock, growing fruits and vegetables, and related rural know-how in more than a dozen books, including What’s Killing My Chickens? and the best-selling Storey’s Guide to Raising Chickens, The Chicken Encyclopedia, The Chicken Health Handbook, and Hatching & Brooding Your Own Chicks. Damerow is a contributor to Chickens and Hobby Farms magazines and a regular blogger for Cackle Hatchery. She lives in Tennessee with her husband, where they operate a family farm with poultry and dairy goats, a sizable garden, and a small orchard. Visit her online at gaildamerow.com.