Now THAT’S an Ocado delivery!
Take a box of supermarket eggs, add one enthusiastic little girl and a pinch of luck ... how the Mail hatched an adorable Easter surprise
THE clock is flashing 6.30 on a Saturday morning and I’m woken by a delicate, but insistent, tweeting. For 20 minutes I do my best to ignore it, reminding myself that spring has sprung and it’s probably just the dawn chorus.
But something isn’t quite right. The noise isn’t coming from outside – it’s coming from the landing.
Before I put two and two together, my nine-year- old daughter Martha bursts through the door. ‘It’s the eggs,’ she says. ‘They’ve hatched.’ And how.
Sitting in an incubator outside my bedroom are two tiny, fluffy, adorable chicks. One is yellow, the other a mottled brown. Besides them are the broken shells from which they have emerged, little larger than a Cadbury mini chocolate egg.
I wake up my wife. ‘You’ve got quail,’ I tell her. Maybe it’s the early hour but she fails to laugh at my movie-inspired joke. But at the same time even she can’t hide her astonishment.
Ten days later and we repeat the same routine. This time the new arrival is considerably bigger and even fluffier and comes with an orange bill and comically over-sized webbed feet. It’s a duck whom we promptly call Lucky.
For he (or she – more on this shortly) really is lucky. To appreciate how fortunate this duckling and his quail cousins are, let me tell you where they came from.
A month ago I bought two dozen hen eggs, 18 duck eggs and three dozen quail eggs from a number of supermarkets. The challenge? To see if I could successfully hatch them in to baby birds.
My inspiration was William Atkins, 14, who in February told the Daily Mail how he hatched a duckling in a £40 eBay incubator from an egg bought at Waitrose.
‘I got the idea after a family discussion about whether it would be possible to hatch a supermarket egg as they are not supposed to be fertilised,’ said the schoolboy from Sutton Coldfield, West Midlands. ‘No one took much notice when I started incubating the egg. They were stunned that I hatched one though.’ As for names, William was considering Jeremy or Jemima and would choose when he knew what sex the duckling was.
Which goes to the heart of how it is possible to buy fertile eggs – ones from a hen that has recently ‘enjoyed the company’ of a male bird – from a supermarket at all.
First things first. For my experiment I bought a selection of eggs via the online delivery service Ocado and some from my local Co-op. I placed eight chicken, seven duck and 18 quail eggs into the incubator.
I really didn’t rate my chances. The eggs had been stored, transported and kept refrigerated for some time and those from Ocado were particularly cold to the touch.
Although an egg that is kept cold won’t automatically ‘die’, its chances of developing into a chick are substantially reduced. Nonetheless, into the incubator they went. As well as keeping them warm, it turns the eggs through the day, something that is essential for their development, and which birds do on the nest.
I’ve kept chickens for 15 years and have hatched hen eggs in the past so I know it’s possible to check what’s going on inside the shell during the incubation period. The technique is called ‘candling’ and involves holding a bright light – a torch nowadays – directly underneath the end