It’s no secret that eggs hatch sometimes, even if they come from grocery stores and are intended for omelettes rather than chicken coops. Filipino, Vietnamese, and Cambodian grocery stores that sell the popular snack food balut know this all too well.
Now Japanese blogger Lenosuke has spawned a sea of imitators after purposely trying to hatch a mixed group of supermarket eggs—and succeeding with one adorable quail, the Daily Meal reports. Quail eggs are popular items in Japanese and other Asian markets—they look a lot like a brown version of those small, speckled, hard-sugar-shell candy eggs you see in Easter baskets.
Of course, any real, non-candy eggs need warmth to hatch. In the absence of a mama bird to sit on top of the eggs, Lenosuke set up a heating pad and thermometer inside a styrofoam cooler to serve as a handy incubator.
Next, Lenosuke rounded up some quail eggs and some Silkie chicken eggs from the supermarket and numbered them all to keep track. The incubator kept the nest at a toasty 100°F for the next 17 days.
On the 17th day, one of those quail eggs hatched.
Lenosuke is currently taking care of the baby quail, and RocketNews24 reports that other bloggers across Japan have been inspired by this detailed journal of quail hatchery to attempt to hatch their own. No one has said what they intend to do with their baby quails if and when they do hatch.
This isn’t a new thing, nor even a particularly Japanese thing. There’s an entire multi-year thread on popular backyard chicken-raising forum Backyard Chickens.com (for real) about raising various species of birds from grocery store-bought eggs. It’s more than 198 pages long.
We definitely don’t advise hatching any pet birds unless you plan to take care of them, but you can’t deny that they’re adorable.
[via Lenosuke, The Daily Meal, RocketNews24]