Chicken Trauma Unit

Well, it's been a hectic and traumatic few days in the hatchery (which also happens to be my home office). Let's start with the good news: since this photo was taken, we are now up to 7 chicks.

The bad news is that one of those was born by c-section, sort of. On Saturday, we had an egg that had pipped early Friday but wasn't making any progress toward hatching and seemed to be weakening in its attempts to break through. So I googled hatching problems and found instructions for helping a chick in trouble.

I don't know about you, but I always heard you should never, never, never, ever help a bird out of its egg. This had something to do with them needing the stimulus and exercise of breaking out themselves. But apparently that is not always true.

I'll spare you the gory details, but I followed instructions to help this chick hatch, and she is doing fine. But let's just say I was not cut out for any sort of medical career, and for a half hour after doing chicken surgery, I felt like passing out.

Yesterday we lost one that no one knew had pipped. That was our first loss, and it was hard. If I'd realized that chick was in trouble, I would have saved it, too. That's when we started feeling like a Chicken Trauma Unit.

To end on a positive note, Chick 7 hatched without incident and with all three of us watching late last night. There are three more eggs in the incubator, and then we're done for the year. We need some time to recover, but I know that next summer this will seem like a good idea all over again.

Reading report: Back to Canadian lit., I am reading The Spirit Cabinet by a new favorite writer, Paul Quarrington. (His novel King Leary about an aging hockey star won the Canada Reads competition this year. Another novel Whale Music won Canada's prestigious Governor General's Award.) It's hard to describe his work except to say that he's the Tom Robbins of Canada. He writes about eccentric characters in crazy circumstances, and yet they are essentially so human that we can all imagine ourselves behaving exactly the same way in the same situations. This one is about two European magicians who perform in Las Vegas, and the focus is on their relationship, how people appear and disappear from our lives, and what constitutes "magic."