The Egg Who Didn't Live

You have, no doubt, in the last few years read much about “The boy who lived.” Alas, now you are going to read about the egg who didn't.

There were never any guarantees that all of the eggs were going to make it. In fact, I've read that if you get anything above a 50 percent hatch rate when incubating at home, you're doing well. I had my doubts about this one particular egg from very shortly into our incubating adventure.

Initially when candled, I could see the fat yolk, like a darkened marble, float up to the top of the egg when I gently rolled the egg from side to side. But when the other eggs's yolks started getting larger and covered with the classic spider web of blood vessels, this one little egg's yolk remained a small mass neither more nor less that what we started off with.

This weekend when we could actually see movement in all of the eggs save for this solitary outcast, I finally had to face facts. This egg was not going anywhere and needed to be removed. You need to remove stalled eggs for the shear fact that they are being heated and, like any other bit of protein, will go bad and start to smell (reek) – rotten eggs are unique in the gag-producing world of smells.

There are many reasons why an egg might not develop:

• It might not have even been fertilized in the first place and as we all know, if there's no contributing Daddy then there's no baby chick.
• Any of a million things might have gone wrong. There might have been a genetic abnormality, a literal bump in development startling the embryo enough to halt its growth.
• It might simply be that that's the way it was intended to be.

So we enter day 11 of our incubation with one less egg. A beautiful, light blue egg that may or may not have had the capacity for becoming a chick. We thanked it and set it out in the woods so that some other creature could perhaps get some nourishment from its efforts. Back to dust.

That's kind of the way things are in life. We never know what we have until we know. As it is, even though we have active movement in all 10 of the remaining eggs, I'm just not going to count them until they've hatched.  

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