Tuesday, August 5, 2008

Veins!

Yesterday while Dawn was off the nest getting something to eat, Christian snuck an egg for me to candle.

We have veins!

I tried to take a photo, but it was really hard to get myself smushed into the coat closet, hold the flashlight and the egg and also focus the camera in the dark. I had to use auto-focus to free up my left hand, but it has trouble working that close to the subject... and in the dark, to boot.

Eventually I gave up and put the egg on a shelf, but then I couldn't block the light from escaping out the sides. Guinea eggs are small. And after all that, the camera still had trouble.

You'll have to use your imagination here - but this is a fertile egg. It's totally out of focus, but I give up. In the lower left, you can see the yolk and the veins branch out from there.

There are 15 in the nest. Go, Dawn, go!

2 comments:

Pam said...

Awesome! What is the plan? More laying hens and eat the roosters? Just curious. I am still trying to figure out if it is legal to keep chickens in Bellaire :-)

Blue Heron Farm said...

These are guineas. So the eggs are small and hard to crack, though they are edible. We haven't eaten any yet.

We'll keep whatever we get. Guineas are notoriously bad mothers, so we may not even get any. :( But they are great bug eaters, so as long as we don't have more meanies, we'll keep 'em. And learn to cook the meanies.