The Hatching

Friday, eggs started wiggling in the incubator. I thought the hatching would happen soon after, but oh, how wrong I was. Friday afternoon and Saturday was pure agony for me. Every five minutes, I would check the incubator to see if there was any progress. Finally, Saturday afternoon, I began to see pip marks on a few of the eggs. I went to bed Saturday night thinking that just maybe we would end up with no chicks at all. But at one o'clock in the morning, the first chick broke out. From that point on, we had chicks hatching continually. Here are a few of the photos I took:

the chick breaks around the circumference of the egg so it can break the end out of the egg

a little wing popping out

taking a break mid-struggle

the kids named one of the three black chicks. this may or may not be 'Rockstar'

We've had chicks peeping in the house for the past two nights, and needless to say, I haven't slept well. Today, I moved all but the late-hatchers out to the shop. Maybe tonight I will sleep peacefully.

This afternoon, while giving  the chicken coop got a badly-needed cleaning, I realized there just isn't room in that one for the addition of 23 chickens- even for the short term. We're either going to have to build an addition or get the stable cleaned out to make a secondary coop there... And I need to get that chicken plucker built...

Long week.

It's been a long week since my last post.

On Valentine's Day, Chris noticed that another of the neighbor's goats had twin babies. They must have been a bit premature, because they didn't get to their feet at all that first day, and the mama lost interest, so we ended up with two more goats to try to bottle feed. One was an all brown girl, the other a white and brown boy. We set them up in the bath tub for the first few nights, feeding them round the clock. The little girl was really weak, and I had the feeling she wouldn't make it. And although she rallied on the second day and actually took the bottle and struggled to stand on her wobbly legs, she died Thursday morning.

I kicked Little Billy out of the house the same day, setting him up with a little box and hay for shelter under the porch, and reclaimed my bathroom. He seemed to be doing fine until he ended up with scours (diarrhea) on Saturday. Even though I didn't have diapers to change, his bawling and the middle of the night feeds (in combination with my own kids' night-time troubles) left me as exhausted as having a human newborn on my hands. Thankfully the neighbors took him back yesterday where they can keep him in their barn and he can't wake anyone but the chickens up at night.

The experience has got me thinking a bit more about the difference between pets and livestock. There is something intense and amazing about taking a living thing that would die without intervention and giving it that chance to live. But then I think about the farmer trying to make a living. Are all the hours it takes to keep a struggling animal alive worth the amount of profit in the long run? (Because, honestly, Little Billy is destined for the butcher.) And so I ponder.

Wednesday, our neighbor who had been fighting ALS died. I wasn't sure how to deal with it with the kids. Joe and Z are still young enough that death is just a fact and so they don't seem to grasp loss or feel any emotion about it at all. Finley does. She seems to handle death with the animals well. It makes her sad, but she doesn't get too upset unless Joe keeps talking about it. Chris took Joe to the visitation while I was out on an errand with the girls. Finley did NOT want to see the body and claimed the funeral was going to be boring, so in the end, since Chris was working and wasn't there to help me deal with it, I didn't force them to go to the funeral with me.

A lot of focus on death lately... I'm ready to focus on more life. Chicks are due in about four days.

Counting My Chickens Before They Hatch

Last night, we candled the eggs. I had a total of 37 eggs to start with, thinking that a lot of them probably wouldn't be viable and hoping that in the end we'd end up with a dozen or so chicks.

 One egg was a "quitter": an egg whose embryo started to develop, then died early on. Those have an obvious "blood ring" visible but no blood vessels. And there were two or three eggs that had a thick and/or dark shell that didn't let me see inside. But it looks like those roosters have been pretty busy, because of the eggs I could see into, I couldn't find any that hadn't been fertilized. Aside from the quitter, they all had the tell-tale web of blood vessels developing with a dark little blob in the midst of them.

The photo below isn't clear enough to see the blood vessels, but you can see the dark embryo blob. In some of the eggs, we could even see the blob moving. (Click here to see a pretty cool video of a candled egg. It's amazing.)

So at this point, we have at least 33 eggs with obvious embryos inside. It's still not a sure thing that they will hatch, but I'm almost worried that we'll have more chicks than I was hoping for. I guess I need to get busy building that chicken plucker.

Moonlight Passing

Just yesterday, I was marveling at the miracle of life. How a pile of eggs, that look so much like stones and are so detached from another living being can hold so much life inside of them. I was thinking about seeds, some that can lay dormant for 40 years, holding onto LIFE that can suddenly spring forth under the right conditions.

Today, I am thinking about the ambiguity of death.

I got a call this morning from our neighbors who were on their way to Florida for a little vacation. The night before, one of their goats gave birth to twins. One of them died at birth, and the other was living, but the mother had apparently rejected it. Denise wanted us to go check to see if the baby was doing alright. I loaded the kids up in the van and off we went. Finley spotted the little goat right away, plopped down next to the wall of the lean-to, head drooped over a piece of lumber. I thought it was dead at first, but, no, it's head flopped and a pathetic bleat escaped its lips.

"I don't think it's going to make it," I told the kids.
Finley protested, "We've got to help it..."

So I handed the baby goat to Finley, ordered the kids to the van, and while I made a few phone calls and located the powdered colostrum, they hovered around the poor goat, giving it plenty of attention. We brought it back to the trailer, and I had Finley sit down on the kitchen floor with the goat while I mixed up the colostrum. The thing was so weak, it couldn't even suck the nipple, so I pulled out a dropper and spent the next fifteen minutes or so squirting the replacer into its mouth. It appeared to swallowing a little, so after 1/4 cup or so, I set it down with its head on a towel to let it rest. I figured if it perked up in a little while, I could give it some more, but if not...

A minute or two later, it looked like it was no longer breathing. Finley insisted it wasn't dead, and sure enough, a second later, it's tail twitched. I looked closer, and caught a glimpse of some fur moving gently from the throb of a blood vessel. Another minute, and that movement was gone, too. "It's dead," I declared, though I hadn't seen the glazing of the eyes or heard the last sigh that seems to signify death in movies and books.

And so, quite unexpectedly, I ended up with a dead baby goat on my kitchen floor waiting to be buried, and children begging for some lunch.

T Minus 21 and Counting

We've got 36 eggs carefully laid out in the incubator. It's going to take everything in me not to hover over them for the next 21 days.

Looking Forward

I've been doing better since throwing my little tantrum the other day. Sometimes you just need to let a little bad air out, then suck in a big, lungful of good air. And there's plenty of good air to be had around here.

Daffodils are blooming. They might be a little early, but so what?

Yesterday, I started some onion seed. Last year, the onions I started from seed weren't so impressive. In going over my planting schedule for this year, I realized that if I can be putting out onion sets in early March, that means the seed needs a 4-6 week start on that date. (Duh.)

The chickens are laying like crazy. Yesterday, the little dragon and I collected 8 eggs. That means that 8 of my 10 laying hens put out yesterday. (Two others hens are in the pet category.)

Who is the little dragon, you ask?

Z has been wearing her dragon costume nearly non-stop for a week. I did manage to wash it one day.

Speaking of eggs... We are borrowing the neighbor's incubator (it is sitting here next to my laptop) and are going to hatch out our own eggs this year. I am giddy. Tomorrow afternoon, I plan on starting the incubation. That takes 21 days, usually, so if anyone wants to come out to the Funny Farm on the the 25th or 26th, we will have some fluffy little chicks for you to dote upon, Lord willing.