Quail Hatchlings

Last night, as I told you in my previous post, we had our first egg pip.  By bedtime, nothing had progressed any further, but when we checked on them around 2:30am, the chick was completely out of the shell!

Here’s a video:

What’s really sweet is that she already wants to come to the sound of our voices…even though she is barely able to walk.  You can see that toward the end of the video.

The next day (after the first chick was starting to get really, really lonely!) a second egg hatched.  It was so fast!  I’d noticed it had pipped, but the crack hadn’t gotten any bigger in a few hours.  Then, all of sudden, the chick broke the shell all the way around the top.  After that, it was only a minute or so until complete hatch.  This one, I caught on film.

Part one:

Part two:

And part three, where the two chicks meet for the first time:

What really surprised me about the whole process is how active the newborn chicks are.  The first chick stumbled around constantly, bumping into, climbing over, and rolling around the remaining eggs.  She seemed to be especially attracted to the ones that had pipped – I couldn’t hear anything, but I bet she could hear the chick inside peeping!

The “unzippered” shell – she’s ready to come out!

The head pops out.

And finally, the entire body.  She’s so exhausted, she almost looks dead.  But she’s perfectly fine.

I thought originally, based on where the egg was when it hatched, that she was another of the Italians.  But her feathers are SO much lighter and golden than the first, that I now thing she’s a Blonde.  The first chick must have shoved her egg down into the “Italian Section”.  Pretty soon, with both chicks in there rambling around, it’s going to be impossible to tell what an egg is until it hatches.

They are so cute – only about one and a half inches!  I really, really want to hold one, but I can’t open the incubator until the rest hatch.  I can see pips on at least eight more eggs right now, and I figure there’s still more pips that I can’t see because the angle is wrong.