A watched pot may not boil, but the Homer Township Public Library is betting that watched eggs will still hatch.
Library officials are bringing back the “Chick-it-Out” Hatch Program, where the library incubates and hatches a dozen chicken eggs borrowed from The Children’s Farm in Palos Park, with round-the-clock live video on the library’s website.
“The community was crazy for it, from seniors who remember hatching chicks in their schools to kids who were just amazed to see something like this,” library executive director Sheree Kozel-La Ha said.
Kozel-La Ha said she got the idea from a librarian in Chicago Ridge in 2009 but had to put the egg cam on hiatus after 2011 during a major project to put an addition on the library, 14320 W. 151st St. The addition was completed in 2013.
The eggs were laid Sunday and Monday and arrived at the library on Tuesday. Adult Services Manager Alexandra Annen drove them from the farm to the library in a grocery-style egg carton, and she and library assistant Patti Nakutis inscribed numbers in pencil on the shells and gingerly transferred them to a small incubator atop a book display.
Annen and Nakutis said they took a one-day embryology course to prepare. The incubator automatically turns the eggs every hour, but library staff still need to carefully monitor the eggs’ temperature and humidity, Annen said.
The chicks are expected to hatch after 21 days, on April 19. Library patrons will soon be able to monitor the eggs’ progress on a live webcam feed on the library’s website, http://www.homerlibrary.org
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, Kozel-La Ha said.She said that in past years, people have checked out the egg cam up to 17,000 times per year, even though for most of the incubation the eggs are essentially motionless.
“I’d watch from home myself,” she said. “A couple of days before they hatch, you can see them start to move and their feet peeking through.”
Kozel-La Ha said the library is also using the eggs to promote chicken-, farm- and even chicken pox-related books. Patrons who correctly guess which egg will hatch first have a chance to win a basket of chocolate eggs, and there will also be a chick-naming contest, she said.
“Yolk-o Ono,” “Omelet” and “Eggs Benedict” have been popular picks in the past, Nakutis said.
But none of the chicks are at risk of living up to those names. Kozel-La Ha said the chicks will be on display in a glass case at the library for about two weeks before heading back to The Children’s Farm.
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