The Little Chick Who Can

Editor's note: This blog post should have posted Friday, but due to a technical issue it never appears to have made it onto the site. We apologize for the delay in this post.

Normally I put up an inspirational post on Friday’s, just a little something on which to ponder.

This week, instead, I’m putting up an inspirational story that won’t keep until Monday.

Yesterday when my friend arrived to pick up the incubator, there was still that one remaining egg that hadn’t hatched. There are a million things that can go wrong with eggs, the chick can become disoriented and attempt to hatch from the wrong end (fatal), the chick can just stop developing (fatal) or the chick could have had a catastrophic development issue non-compatible with life (extremely fatal).

Being the micro-biologist/scientist that I am, I was very interested in seeing if we could determine a cause of death for this one lone egg. It’s part of life, at times I can be very rational, I can deal with it. I went in the house to get the tweezers and scissors while my friend examined the egg.

"You’re not going to believe this," he told me as I came out onto the porch, "it’s peeping."

Sure enough, if you held the egg up to your ear, you could hear it peep from deep inside.

What? It’s alive???? Forget being rational, all my mama hormones flew into full gear.

What to do now? The chick was clearly alive, but was also in distress. For some reason, although it made it to the air sac and was breathing (hence the peeping) it couldn’t go any further.

My friend had warned me that under no circumstances was I to interfere with nature. If a chick can’t make it out of the shell, it happens that way for a reason, you’re not doing any one any favors by helping it out. Let nature take its course.

That’s not so easy to say, though, when you are holding an egg with a live chick who is caught inside.

We decided to operate.

Piece by piece we first pulled the shell off. Under it was a membrane that was so tough it felt more like leather – this was definitely a hard egg to crack.

We cut through the membrane and then pulled all the slimy gunk off the bird.

Her eyes were closed, she was barely moving. She definitely didn’t look ready for life, but she was breathing and so we decided to give her a chance.

We re-fired up the incubator, filled it with extra water to ensure high humidity, stroked her body with a little bit of water, placed her in a small plastic dish and then waited.

Little by little she started kicking her legs out.

Then she started moving her wings.

Every hour that she was alive was another hour that she was alive.

I sat vigil with her last night playing Jim Croce and Tim McGraw CDs. I figured she has missed out on the noise and commotion of the initial hatching and so a little noise with a solid beat might help her out. I read "Carte Blanche" – a new James Bond book out loud. If you imagine Daniel Craig as the main character, whose heart rate wouldn’t get stronger?

She became so active that I moved her out of the tiny plastic dish onto the incubator’s wire base, she needed something that had traction so that she could grab hold.

She started getting up as unsteady as a drunken sailor crashing into walls and tumbling onto her back. Several times I had to untangle her from the incubator’s thermometers.

I finally went to bed around 1 a.m. thinking that she was either going to make it or not, I’d done all that I could and we’d know in the morning.

And then Spencer, who had come home from a late movie, came up to my bedroom and told me that the little one was not going to make it. She had bloody body parts coming out of her.

Oh noo, I thought as I got up from bed. Darn, this little one deserved to live. It didn’t seem fair.

I went downstairs to check and sure enough, there was a large red, bloody mass coming out of her belly. She was attached and couldn’t move away from it. It didn’t look good. I got out the scissors and cut it off.

Heartbroken, I decided to let her slowly die in quiet and warmth, I’d deal with her body in the morning.

But when I checked on her this morning, she was alive and active. Apparently (from doing a little bit of research) she had rejected the yolk that chicks absorb right before they hatch, from a survival point of view not the best move. Okay…

She was active, she was dry. If she had no yolk on which to survive then she was going to need food and water pretty quickly. I put her in with the other chicks. As the littlest and weakest, she was sure to be pecked by the others (especially that first born blonde bully who seems to be picking on everyone), but without food she was sure to die. I decided to take a chance with her siblings.

When I placed her in the box, the other chicks rallied around her. They’ve surrounded her when she’s so tired that she just drops down, giving her their body heat. They’ve given her space to move around and have not pecked at her. They are accepting her, warts and all.

This little chick is not out of the woods yet, she’s still extremely weak and we need to see if she can eat and drink and then eliminate waste from her body. But you know what? She just might make it. This appears to be the little chick who can.

And if that’s not an inspirational story worthy of a Friday post, I don’t know what is.

Editor's note: Make sure you go check out Simple Thrift to catch up on the hatching process documented there. -- Carolyn