When Josh Dubois fired up a generator Saturday night after losing power, it wasn’t to light up his house or save food in the refrigerator. His only thought was for the 18 eggs getting ready to hatch in his incubator.
And how to explain 18 surprise brunch “guests” to his in-laws.
Dubois was just one among thousands who lost electricity this past weekend when Maine was hit by a major snowstorm. He might have been ready to brave the cold and dark, but the unhatched chicks were not.
“The only reason I ran the generator was for those eggs,” Dubois said.
To hatch, fertilized chicken eggs must be kept between 100 and 102 degrees Fahrenheit. Left out in the coop, the mother hen sits on her eggs, keeping them in the optimum temperature range.
To hatch them out without the mother hen, you need an incubator in which the eggs stay toasty and warm until the chicks hatch.
But incubators run off electricity and that was the problem for Dubois and other chicken farmers around the state this weekend when the storm knocked out power.
On their Lemon Ledge Farm in Richmond, Sybil Peterson and Ron Lemons saw their lights flicker twice and then go out around 9 p.m. Saturday.
Like Dubois, their first thought was for the 250 eggs getting ready to hatch in an incubator and for the 100 hours-old chicks that had hatched just that day and needed to be kept warm.
Scolding themselves for not getting a new generator when their old one went on the blink several storms ago, Peterson and Lemons turned to their community for help.
It was swift in coming, thanks to the very active social media page Richmond Friends and Family.
“I posted on the Facebook page asking if there was anyone who could help us,” Peterson said. “I wrote that I knew it was miserable out, that it was late and we were desperate.”
Desperate enough that she was ready to move her egg operation out to her car and leave the vehicle running with the heat on as long as she had to do so, Peterson said.
The responses started coming in almost immediately. Offers of help came to the original post, to the farm’s social media page, and as direct calls and text messages.
People offered generators. Those who still had power and heat offered to take tubs of birds for as long as needed.
In the end, they secured a generator from a nearby neighbor.
“We had never really met him before,” Peterson said. “Now we have new friends.”
Meanwhile in Arundel, Dubois and his family had more than the 18 incubating eggs to worry about. On Sunday they were slated to host an Easter brunch.
But with no power, the event was moved to his in-laws’ home in Greenland, New Hampshire, about 35 miles away. Dubois did not want the generator running in his absence.
“I called my mother-in-law and asked if I could bring my incubator down and she said, ‘absolutely’,” Dubois said. “So I carefully packed up the kids and my eggs in their incubator, plugged it into my truck and made the 40-minute trip to Greenland.”
Everyone at the brunch was fascinated by the eggs, and are now vested in their progress, Dubois said.
Now that power has been restored, things are getting back to normal at Lemon Ledge Farm and for Dubois. Thanks to the help of a community and family, all eggs are expected to hatch and the chicks that hatched on Saturday are healthy.
Sentiment aside, had things not gone well, it would have been a significant loss of investment for Peterson and Lemons.
The unhatched eggs represented a $1,300 expense and Peterson sells her chicks for around $10 each. Most of those hatched on Saturday were pre-sold.
She and Lemons also learned a lesson about being prepared.
“It was totally on us. We knew the generator needed replacing,” Peterson said. “We knew we messed up.”
As a thank you to the community that came to the rescue, Peterson sold eggs on Sunday at a sharply reduced price.
“I was happy to do that,” she said. “We are just so appreciative.”
