Circle of life
Well, the sick chick lasted through the night and took one more feeding of egg yolk mixed with water, molasses, and cider vinegar. She seemed to revive a little bit but died less than an hour later. Our second mortality here on the farm.
Still, today was not all sad.
With an improvised coffee-can candler, Sofía and I candled the incubated eggs today. To my surprise, all 8 looked good! Well, the shells of 3 were too thick to see clearly, but looked promising.
See the spiderwebby veins in there? That’s the amniotic sac. And the dark spot in the middle is the little chick.
Sofía and I could see it moving. It pulsed every few seconds, swam further away, swam closer. Flipped over. Sofía and I were shrieking with delight “Look at it move! It’s alive! That tiny little chick is alive!”
I know the old saying “Don’t count your chickens before they’ve hatched.” So much can go wrong in the next two weeks, even up to the day they’re supposed to pip open their shells and step out into the world.
But still. They are beautiful.
Life goes on.
February 23rd, 2011 at 7:25 pm
How amazing that you can share all this with Sofia. Gives me goosebumps!
February 24th, 2011 at 12:00 pm
You should come over and see them! 😀
February 23rd, 2011 at 9:09 pm
exciting! very cool.
February 24th, 2011 at 2:03 am
so exciting. I hadn’t known you could see the chick in the egg until I was reading last night; now I see how it’s done.So much fun for Sofia to actually see it. Now you’ll have to watch her like a hawk so she doesn’t try to “see” them by herself.
Did I ever tell you that I thought chocolate milk came from brown cows until my Brownie troop visited the Berkeley Farms Dairy at age 9 or maybe younger. City girl, me.
Sorry about the little chick you lost last night.
February 24th, 2011 at 7:11 pm
I need to take Haylie on a field trip to your farm. You do so many cool things!
February 24th, 2011 at 11:57 pm
We would just love that! As long as she’s not afraid of chickens.