| Victoria was very good at sitting on that nest. But having live chicks show up expecting and needing her to be the mother? Not so much. And it was a cruel trick that I played on my poor chicken, putting the hatching eggs under her when she hadn't been sitting on them for three weeks. Hopefully if she'd had three weeks with them, she would've figured out what to do when they hatched.
But at the time when I took these pictures, it was all OK still.
Our little eggs, each containing a live chick that peeps when you tap the shell.
Look! This one pipped!
When chicks are born, they begin by pipping. That is, they make one small hole in the shell. Then they might do nothing for hours. The important thing is that the membrane doesn't dry out, making it too hard for them to eventually "unzip" themselves by breaking the egg cleanly in two. And apparently, it's important for their leg development that they physically push themselves out of their eggshells - you really can't help them, even though it's so tempting, and even though some die while hatching. It's somewhat amazing to me that every single chicken alive on earth hatched this way, and the factory farms have not figured out some way (to my knowledge) to get around these key steps involved in baby chicks hatching.
After an hour or so, I went back to the nest to check on progress and I found this little one running around. She'd somehow gotten out of the nest box, into another part of the coop.
Victoria, the proud mother, never noticed. That seemed odd. The chick definitely got it that Victoria was "Mom," but Victoria had no idea that there was a chick under her.
When Victoria did notice the chick, she rejected it. She tried to peck it several times, so I removed it from the coop and put it in a box inside under a light. At the end of the day, what started as five live chicks in eggs ended as three dead chicks in eggs, one dead hatched chick, and only one live but motherless hatched chick. So much for the idea of putting day-old chicks under your broody hen. I'm sure it works sometimes, but Victoria wasn't having any of it.
She wanted to sit on her eggs, dammit. Three whole weeks baby, or more. Whatever it takes. She would sit on a wooden egg til it hatched. And she just wasn't up to three days of 100F+ weather. Poor girl.
Rest in peace, Victoria. We loved you.
|
