Hatch Day

I bought an incubator last spring. McMurrays Hatchery was sold out of chicks by the time I got my order together and I thought the forty bucks for an incubator would pay off handily if I didn't have to buy day-old chicks in the mail anymore. I also thought it might be a little fun.

But a forty-dollar incubator doesn't have a precision-controlled thermostat and I got the eggs a little hot and then put more eggs in and ended up with five live chicks, three of whom lived to adulthood, one of whom, Mr. Feathers, crossed the maturity finish line and pretty much died with the tape still stretched across his feathered breast.

I ordered chicks from McMurrays in the fall and those birds, the Rainbow Layer Assortment, have just started to lay. Some lay white eggs, some brown, but weirdly, about half of them lay shades of blue. The packing slip just says, "Rainbow," and I've spent all winter trying to figure out what breeds of birds I've got out there. I think I have finally identified the colorful Mystery Bird as a white-laying Rose Comb Leghorn by the white feathers around her ears. There's a Blue Cochin who looks like she's wearing 1970s fuzzy apres ski boots, a Golden Laced Wynadott, four Rhode Island Reds, three Barred Rocks, an Anconda, a bald-necked Turken, and a about a dozen Ameracaunas. Hence the blue eggs. In the course of trying to ID the birds, I read the catalog inside and out and got sort of interested in some of the breeds. Cuckoo Maran's lay chocolate brown eggs and I'm rather wishing I had a few of those. I'm even finding myself coveting chickens with the fuzzy head feathers, because a barnyard needs a little comic relief.

I realize, of course, that I'm starting to sound like a Chicken Lady. I just bought a book, The Joy of Keeping Chickens, by our pocket of the world's resident Crazy Chicken Lady, Jen Megyesi. I appreciate the technical components and Jen's storytelling, but when it comes to using the words "love" and "chicken" in the same sentence and the chicken is alive and not, say in Chicken Saltimboca, I just couldn't relate.

But I fear that I might be on the path.

For no good reason at all, I started the incubator three weeks ago. I took a few dozen eggs from my older chickens and a dozen from Nancy's Barred Rocks, filled the humidity tray and plugged it in. I did almost nothing else, except to make a note of when to take them off the automatic turner three days before the expected hatch date. Even as I was moving them, with their non-liquid weightiness, I didn't actually believe there were chickens in there, or if there were, that they would make it out of the shells alive to one day run around the farm and creep me out.

Even yesterday, as the first eggs started to move a bit, I was doubtful. And then there were little beaks poking through, opening and closing, drinking up the fresh air. I quick ran and googled chicken hatching to see if I was supposed to help them, but the internet was silent on the issue. The Chicken Hatching for Dummies website, apparently, was down for maintenance and no one who actually knew anything about chickens would think that a human being should get involved in the hatching process. But I couldn't help it. I'm a scab picker and a life-saver cruncher and on top of that, I thought maybe my chickens lay especially strong eggs and that the poor chick wouldn't make it out on her own. (In the livestock world, they're all female until proven otherwise, no matter how un-pretty they may be.)

So I helped a little bit, peeling back a little shell here and a little lining there, around the hole the chicken made with her beak tooth. Then I got worried about an egg that had been rolling around for hours without a pip. Bolstered by my successful extrication of Live Chicken 1 and Live Chicken 2 (and not humbled by Dead Chicken 1), I decided to crack it open, ever so gently, and help the poor thing out. Bad idea. There was too much liquid, too much yolk, and although it moved around and made a little noise, in a few hours I had Dead Chicken 2.

I tried hard not to keep checking on them, but even if I managed to distract myself and move on to another task, Oliver kept climbing up on the counter, threatening the whole operation with his toddler enthusiasm, singing, "Chicken. Chicken. Baby Chicken. Me see. Baby Chicken." And I should confess that the real reason I'm sitting down to write this on a day when my To Do list reads like an easy month for Heracles, is that I'm trying to keep from checking on the chickens. It's working, but it's hard.

Oh. I hear Oliver singing.

I promised myself I was just going to get Oliver and maybe set him snacking, but then I happened to see two new eggs pipped and one of them didn't seem to have broken through and I worried that my chicken friend had tried to get some fresh air but then got too tired to finish the job. So then I promised myself I was only going to make it a little teeny hole. But then the egg shell was sort of fun to peel off and every bit I did was saving valuable energy that the chicken could channel toward staying alive. But I stopped short of peeling off the lining, thinking that it would be best if the chicken undressed herself when she felt ready. So now there is a weird egg-shaped bag of wet, curled-up chicken in the incubator. Part of me feels helpful and part of me feels really stupid for creating such a pathetic, unnatural sight. And of course I want to go back and peel some more. But I promised myself I wouldn't.

What I did do was to give the dry, but-not-yet-vibrant hatchlings some Gatorade. When I got my first chicks, Nancy gave me this Kwik-Chik stuff that you mix with their water to give them vitamins and electrolytes. I used it a little, but I got it in my head that it wasn't organic and put it away to reconsider for a future batch. This fall, I tossed it in a rare fit of housekeeping (which was pretty much confined to the one shelf that housed this useful product). But a person who lets her kids swallow the toothpaste rather than give them supplemental fluoride is the kind of person who thinks, "Electrolytes? There's more than one way to skin that cat!" And so now we're conducting an experiment to determine the relative benefit of administering America's favorite sports drink to hour-old chickens. Preliminary results seem to indicate that the chickens don't think it tastes very good, but it is at least not fatal on contact.

I just went to turn the oven on to bake some cookies and happened to walk by incubator. The chicken-in-a-sac hadn't made progress, so I peeled her. It seemed like the perfectly right thing to do at the time. The other chicken was maybe getting kind of tired and I hate it when they die halfway out of the egg, so I peeled her two. Now they're resting from the ordeal, no doubt gearing up to be running around, all vibrant-like, when I check on them next, which I'm hoping won't be for a while.

Trying to give myself a project that would take a little time away from Chickenwatch, I took an inventory, to date:

4 eggs that candled clear and were pulled before the hatch
4 dead chickens
4 live chickens with a good, fighting chance
1 sleepy, strong-breathing chicken with decent odds to move to the Live-Chickens-With Fighting-Chance side of the box
2 sleepy, not-so-strong breathing chickens who may surprise me, but probably won't make it
2 wet, peeled chickens who have been completely disoriented by my interventions and don't know at the moment if they're alive or dead, but who happen to be breathing
13 eggs that feel funny if I pick them up, which I'm trying really, really hard not to do.