Let’s Hatch Chicks!: A Day-by-Day Chick Hatching Guide for Kids by Lisa Steele
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
When one of my first hens disappeared, I though she had been eaten by a hawk. So much for having free-range chickens.
Imagine how surprised I was to not only discover her, about three weeks later, but also her eight little chicks. And although she had sat on them all, in the middle of winter, where the temperatures at night had gotten to freezing, they were all fine, and each one different from their mother.
What I didn’t know back then, could have been answered by this book, which is unique in the way it looks at the life cycle of a hen, by focusing on both incubator chickens, as well as ones raised by hens themselves.
And one of the facts that they pointed out, was, that although chickens will sit on their eggs for the whole three week to hatch them, they couldn’t possibly have laid all the eggs themselves, since they can only put out about one a day at most. What they do is let other hens lay their eggs, and then sit on all of them.
So, I like how this shows kids how baby chicks grow, both if they are with their mother hens, and in an incubator.
Well written, and follows one mother hen around, through the whole process. Good introduction to kids on life cycle.
Thanks to Netgalley for making this book available for an honest review.