My Million-Dollar Donkey (19 page)

So, instead of questioning why our life reinvention was not working in the areas that counted most, Mark and I dove into change with more conviction than ever, almost frantically, trusting that once the metamorphosis was complete, happiness would be ours.

We kept changing, changing, changing... and not changing at all.

Baby chicks and bunnies are the Easter gifts of choice for an animal-crazed kid. My daughter had hands-on experience with both by now, which took away any hope that a little ball of fuzz would assure her ultimate joy on Easter morning. But an incubator... now that would be breaking new ground. Not only would hatching chicks at home be fun, but educational as well. Mark muttered that a chocolate bunny and a stuffed toy would suffice, but gave his consent, so on Easter morning Neva received candy nestled inside an eighteen-inch-square still-air incubator.

The incubator was nothing more than a small box made of Styrofoam with a light for warmth and a grid bottom. Water was poured into grooves in a lower panel to create humidity. A four inch plastic window on the lid allowed eager owners an opportunity to view the contents without disrupting the temperature, but four times a day the lid would have to be removed to hand turn the eggs inside. Incubating eggs was an interactive activity. Cool!

The family members all had an opinion about what eggs we should try to hatch. Mark suggested starting with a few of our own (free) random chicken eggs, but we had more than enough chickens now, so I was pushing for something novel like quail or duck eggs. Kent thought we should hatch an ostrich and claimed that if we did, he would ride the bird someday (his idea of a joke, I think). Neva didn’t care what we hatched, as long as she could watch a real live baby bird come into the world.

The day after Easter, Neva found one little bantam chicken egg in a pile of hay, which she happily put in the incubator. We drew a cute smiley face on the shell with Magic Marker so we could keep track in the turning process. In my opinion, one little chicken egg didn’t justify a 30-day commitment to egg rotation, so I was on the lookout for more eggs.

The feed store didn’t sell eggs for incubation, and the only other store around was Wal-Mart, which had a lot of farm needs but no fertilized eggs, so I typed “bird eggs” into a search on eBay and sure enough, dozens of sources for fertilized eggs popped up.

Neva and I were leaning towards ducks, so I bid on several breeds and ended up winning a dozen Appellate duck eggs. To celebrate, I made a quick visit to Amazon for poultry hatching books. Then, I went back to eBay to browse a bit more, mostly just to gawk at the offerings. That’s when I stumbled upon peacock eggs for auction.

Peacocks! A glamorous, sophisticated bird with tail feathers spread in ornamental splendor would add a touch of elegance to my environment, the perfect antidote to the endless mud and frustration served up each day by my more common animals. A must-have in my opinion!

“Neva, wouldn’t peacock eggs be cool to get?” I called out.

She was lying on the floor working a puzzle. “I like ducks.”

I was counting on my animal-crazed child begging for peacocks to provide a convenient excuse for further eBay shopping. Dang. “Peacocks are so pretty.”

“I like ducks.”

“You will like peacocks, too,” I said as I placed a bid on two blue peafowl eggs for incubation despite her lack of enthusiasm. (Blue being the common peacocks you so often see at zoos, which are actually green and turquoise in color.)

Within an hour, I’d won the bid for twenty eight dollars. Naturally, I felt compelled to browse more, just to establish what a good deal I was getting. Low and behold, another person was offering two pure white peafowl incubator eggs, and this seller was throwing in two of the more common blues too. The only thing more striking than a beautiful blue-green peacock would be a snow-white one! The white peacock bird eggs with the two bonus blue bird eggs were forty eight dollars. Shipping added about twenty dollars to each order, so all told, I had six peacock eggs for one hundred and sixteen bucks.

Whether or not I was going to end up with a viable baby peacock was anyone’s guess, but I did the math and felt the project was a fair risk.

A fully-grown peacock costs about one to two hundred dollars depending on the bird’s sex. Peacocks have a wild nature and when you acquire them as adults, they often fly the coop—literally. Two hundred dollars is a hefty price tag for an animal you may only own for a day or two, but baby peacocks bond to the place they are raised. I saw a pair of baby peafowl chicks at the feed store for a hundred dollars once. Fifty dollars for one little chick seemed expensive, considering young poultry don’t always survive and the buyer had no clue what gender they were getting. Boys become the beautiful, striking peacocks that become the logo for a TV channel, but the girls grow up to be just big, grey birds. With my luck, I’d get two girls if I bought chicks.

All things considered, starting with peacock eggs seemed like a cost effective way to go, even though sellers won’t guarantee eggs bought on the Internet because they can’t control what happens after the product is shipped. If the eggs don’t hatch, who’s to say the failure is due to a bad egg? If the post office x-rays the package, the embryo dies. Too much jostling or cold might do damage as well. Assuming the eggs arrive intact and are put in an incubator, success still depends on diligence from the person caring for the egg and a heavy dose of luck.

Since we were now proud owners of six peacock eggs in transit, I couldn’t help but speculate what the eggs would look like. Would they be blue like a pheasant’s, or red like certain duck eggs? Maybe they’d be white like a goose egg, or green like a mallard’s. Would they be as big as a fist? Bigger? Would I know the difference between the albino peafowl eggs and those of the more common blue peacocks? When hatched, would the white and blue chicks look different, or would they be impossible to tell apart until later, when they formed feathers? How long until the chicks lose their down and start getting feathers anyway? Would the feathers on a chick hint as to whether they would grow to be boys or girls, or would I have to wait two years to know what sex the birds were? Would male peacocks fight like roosters, so we could only keep one? My questions were endless.

Back to Amazon! I ordered more books, arming myself with as much information as possible. Once the eggs arrived, I would have to let them sit at room temperature, big end up, for 8 hours to settle. Then I’d have to put them in a preheated incubator at 100 degrees with light humidity and turn them four times a day for 39 days.

A hen of any bird breed only turns broody after she has laid a clutch of eggs, and when she begins sitting, she stops laying. Since the time required for eggs to gather are what trigger the bird’s instinct, nature has arranged for eggs to stay “fresh” and hatchable for about six days while a clutch is being formed. This provides just enough time for an enterprising seller to list eggs on eBay and transport them to their new destination in time for a successful incubation.

Growing a peacock from an egg is like starting a garden from seed. I would have to spend a month or so tending the project just to get to the beginning stage – that place where everyone else was buying young plants (or chicks) as starters. But as many gardeners will tell you, growing your plants from seed is not so much about the money saved as the pleasure derived from refining one’s gardening skills. I was convinced hatching a peacock from an egg would make my peacock experience more meaningful.

The duck eggs arrived a few days later, each nestled in a cut section of a foam tube. As I unpacked the last three, a slimy coating dripped from the shells. The very last egg had a hole in the bottom. Poor devil. My first casualty.

I didn’t know whether I was supposed to clean the eggs or leave them with that slimy residue, so I again referred to my poultry book. No answer. I didn’t want to invite bacteria into the incubator from spoiled egg slime, but I also didn’t want to wash the eggs and remove the protective film that was so important during the 39 day incubation period. I decided to wipe the eggs off with a soft, dry towel and put a frowny face on these shells. If these eggs didn’t hatch, I’d attribute the failure to my not cleaning them.

When Neva came home from school we carefully positioned the eggs in the incubator and discussed who would take each shift in the 39-day baby-sitting chore of turning the eggs three times a day. The robust eggs made our little lone chicken egg look like a cousin with stunted growth.

Concerned about starting off eggs at different intervals, I bought a second incubator for the peacocks. When the next package arrived, I carefully unwrapped the contents, eager to see how these exotic bird eggs would differ from the others. The white peacock eggs were brown; the blue peacock eggs a lighter colored beige. They were all the size of a closed fist. Weighty. Substantial, yet fragile. The seller had written a nice note, and thrown in a bonus egg of a black shouldered peacock. The surprise was like getting a diamond ring in a box of crackerjacks.

I took the eggs downstairs and placed them carefully on top of the packing peanuts to settle. I drew happy faces on one side and wrote a description of the breed lightly in pencil on the other, wanting to keep track so when the time came, I’d know what birds had hatched.

The phone rang, and I stepped out for perhaps three minutes. When I returned, my dog was standing in the room with a guilty look on her face.

“Maxine, what do you have?”

The dog lowered her head and ever so gently dropped a peacock egg at my feet, then slunk outside with her tail between her legs. I crouched down to inspect one of my special white peacock eggs that didn’t seem to be damaged in any way other than dog slobber. I took the egg back to the box only to discover there, in the middle of the floor, sat another peacock egg. This one had a small crack in the bottom. As luck would have it, this was my special gift, the black shoulder egg. Granted, I didn’t even know I was getting this egg a half hour earlier, but still, I mourned the loss. I considered putting tape on the crack, but knew once bacteria invades an egg, there was no chance of a successful hatching anyway. The bonus egg had to be tossed.

Fighting back the temper tantrum rising to a boil inside, I put the peacock eggs in my second, preheated incubator, turning down my internal heat by thinking things could have been worse. I could have walked into the room and seen my dog smacking her lips after consuming all five of the expensive globes.

The next morning, my other eBay peacock eggs arrived. I put the dog out and barred the door for the important egg-resting phase. Hours later, these eggs joined the others in the incubator. The peacock project was underway in earnest.

For several days, Neva turned the eggs, but the endless routine quickly lost appeal and she turned the job over to me. “Just call me when they hatch,” she said, more interested in her Gameboy than the incubator. So much for the mother-daughter egg babysitting bonding.

For a month I hovered over the incubator, turning the eggs four times a day. I couldn’t go to lunch or the movies. I had to plan my grocery shopping and equestrian chores carefully. Life went on, but no matter what, I had to turn the eggs.

One day, as I reached in for yet another turn, a duck egg exploded in my hand. Yucky blackish-green goo covered the incubator and the smell of rotten egg invaded the entire downstairs. Oops.

A few days later, another duck egg exploded. Several of the duck eggs were turning grayer each day. Were these eggs dead and just rotting? Perhaps the duck package had been x-rayed during delivery, thus killing the embryos. Then again, maybe I overheated the eggs on one bad day when the humidity dried up and the temperature spiked to 104. The eggs might not even have been fertilized from the beginning.

As I cleaned the incubator, I had visions of all eleven eggs going off like firecrackers, making my entire house smell rancid. Some looked healthy enough, but I decided to throw out the gray ones before they took out every last healthy egg in the incubator, like little duck landmines. I tossed the questionable eggs into the woods. One egg wasn’t that gray, but was so messy due to the rotten gunk clinging to the sides that I didn’t know what else to do with the thing. Not like you can rinse an egg under water this late in the process—or at least I didn’t think so. The not-so-gray egg was weighty, and that bothered me, but still, I was pretty convinced that this egg hatching thing was going to be a complete failure anyway so I was ready to throw them all out. Thinning out the incubator seemed a prudent way to avoid the disgusting clean-up work later, if nothing else.

I moved the six better looking duck eggs into the clean (meaning uncontaminated) incubator with my peacock eggs and continued turning, turning, turning. I felt like the Dunkin’ Donuts baker on the commercial who, looking exhausted, drags himself out of bed each day saying, “Time to make the peacocks...um, I mean donuts.”

When I had just about enough, I reached in one morning to turn my donuts and there was a little bird staring up at me through the window. His feathers were wet and his body swayed to and fro as if gravity were too much for his weak little legs to handle. He rested his chin on his broken eggshell and closed his eyes. I called for Mark. Together, we stared through the tiny window attempting to figure out what had hatched.

“Is that a duckling or a peacock?” I whispered.

“It’s probably Neva’s little bantam.”

“No way. You think he’s a duck? He’s yellow like a duck. I saw a baby peacock at the feed store once, and the chick was brown like Ameraucana chicks. Not like this.”

“That doesn’t look much like a duck to me.”

I couldn’t stand not knowing, so I reached in to get the shell. My copious notes written on the egg confirmed that this hatchling was one of the white peacocks, remarkably, the very egg my dog had carried around in her mouth. (I knew this because I had drawn a little frowny puppy face on the side of the shell.)

By the time Neva came home from school, we could hear peeping from inside the other eggs. Shortly thereafter, a duckling hatched. This bird had typical webbed feet, a bigger head, and a tell-tale round beak. The difference between the two baby birds was so obvious I had to laugh. A duck looks nothing like a peacock. Duh!