The Wisdom of the Radish (23 page)

On day eighteen, I was supposed to increase the humidity substantially and—perhaps the most difficult direction of all to follow—
not open the incubator again until all the chicks were finished hatching
.

According to my obsessive-compulsive research, this could be a long process. Sometimes a chick breaks the shell—the first little tapped-out hole is called a “pip”—and then waits twenty-four hours before undertaking the second part of the hatching process. During this time, the nervous human mother hovering over the glowing incubator worries that the baby has died. She frets, she fidgets, but she must not open the incubator—losing humidity at this crucial step could be fatal to chicks still in the shell.

The second step in the hatching process is called zipping, for good reason. Baby birds are very careful. After a chick pips, it waits until it's absorbed the last of the yolk—until the blood vessels that have connected it to its life support system for
the last three weeks have all dried down. If the chick hatches before this happens, it can literally bleed to death. But once it's ready for the world, it begins methodically tapping out a line of latitude around the egg. Its little egg-tooth (a sharpened point on the beak that falls off shortly after hatching) breaks through the eggshell while a lack of oxygen triggers the bird to kick, which helps it rotate neatly around the egg.

The trouble is, if you're using an artificial incubator, you might not have the humidity quite right. If it's too humid, the chick can literally drown. Over the course of the twenty-one-day incubation period, approximately 15 percent of the egg's water content must evaporate so that when the chick pips, it pips into an air cell—something that enables it to breathe just enough until it manages to break out into the greater atmosphere.

If the environment is too dry, however, the chick can get stuck inside the shell. The membrane that lines the calcareous shell is soft and supple when damp, but dries into something like glue.

Inside the Styrofoam walls of the incubator, a life and death drama waited to play out. The beauty is, chicks have been successfully hatching from eggs for thousands of years; life usually triumphs.

It was three o'clock in the morning when I was awakened by a shrill, angry cheeping coming from the incubator room. Not wanting to wake Emmett, I left the lights off and slipped into the incubator room to huddle over its red glow. One egg had been neatly broken in half, and on the wire mesh floor beside it, a tiny wet creature was heaving—and screaming its tiny little head off. After it screamed for a few seconds, it contorted, kicking out its feet and legs and head erratically, and
convulsed across the floor. Once the chick stopped, it started cheeping again as if to say, “All that work for
this
?”

I couldn't stop the grin from spreading across my face. Watching baby chicks make their way into the world was like Christmas morning. Where for three weeks there was a wrapped package, beautiful and whole, suddenly there were ribbons and wrapping paper everywhere—and a brand-new life rolling around the floor.

I tore my eyes away from the angry little yellow thing to check the progress of the other eggs. Another chick was working its way out, and had zipped a quarter of the way around its egg. A third had broken out a little hole; its beak rested in the microscopic window, moving ever so slightly as it breathed.

I wished them luck, and slipped back into bed.

 

 

 

Twenty-four hours later, puffy chicks in black and dark gray and reddish-yellow and silver were careening around the incubator, bumping into one another in their attempt to find nonexistent breakfast. And that little beak was still there. I'd been checking on it, waiting for it to make progress; a few times I saw it moving in and out like a saw, but it seemed unable to go anywhere. It had been in the same position for twenty-four hours, the allotted time period for the second phase of hatching.

I was pretty sure that the chick was stuck.

Now, some chicken fanciers believe that chicks that get stuck are stuck for a reason—they're not strong enough, they wouldn't have hatched on their own, so it's better to let them die. And then there are those of us who are suckers for tiny creatures trapped in enclosed spaces, trying valiantly to make
their way into the world. Call it compassion, call it claustrophobia, but the thought of dying dark and alone, tiny limbs trapped and intertwined, was too much for me to stomach.

There were still a couple of eggs that hadn't hatched; the “do not open” rule was still in effect. So I didn't
exactly
open the incubator. I draped it in hot, wet towels; Emmett cracked the lid open the tiniest bit; I slipped my hand under the towels and grabbed the egg. At the ready was a hastily assembled chick birthing kit: tweezers, a few Q-tips, a bowl of hot water, and paper towels. Wielding tweezers and mimicking the zipping step, Emmett flaked off bits of the egg around its equator while I moistened the membrane beneath with a Q-tip. We turned on a heat lamp and cradled the egg beneath it so the tiny creature inside wouldn't die of chill.

After Emmett had completed his circumnavigation of the egg, we waited. At this point, the chicken message boards told us, the chick should be able to give a swift kick and finish the job, splitting the egg in two and making its grand entrance into the world.

Nothing happened. The bird wiggled a bit, a tiny movement visible beneath the white membrane. All of our energy was focused on this tiny creature, willing it to kick off the shell.

Nothing happened. “Well,” I said, “Let's keep going.” Emmett continued to flake off bits of eggshell. I started to pull back the membrane. We looked anxiously for blood—there was none. We were safe.

After another minute, I decided it was time to get drastic. This had taken ten minutes, and despite the heat lamp, the egg was cooling to the touch. I pulled off the top half of the egg, and immediately saw why the chick was so attached to his little window. A part of the membrane had dried on to his forehead like cement, completely covering his eye. Emmett pulled off
the wet membrane covering the chick's back and neck. Wetting the hardened part with a Q-tip, I winced as I slowly, steadily pulled it off, hoping that the eyelid wouldn't come with it. It didn't. Then I gently tipped up the bottom half of the egg.

A baby bird fell out into my hand and immediately commenced the psycho spaz dance performed by the other newly hatched chicks. Still curved into an egg shape, he was a skinny thing with slicked down feathers that looked like molten silver—a Splash Orpington, who when fully grown would be a huge, striking white bird flecked with gray. “Ready?” I asked Emmett. He nodded, and cracked open the incubator lid. I slipped the baby chick into a corner, away from his puffy brethren, so he could learn what it was like to move around in his own space without getting too trampled. Approximately one hour of rolling around the incubator seemed to straighten them out—but until then, everything about this tiny life was a prostrate curved comma, including its perfect, tiny feet.

 

 

 

Salmon Faverolles are an exceptional chicken breed originating in France. The hens are sweet, good-natured beige ladies with feathered feet and puffy cheeks and chins. They possess five toes, rather than the typical four: a circus sideshow touch that compliments their whiskers and beards. They lay almost an egg a day all summer long—a tinted, cream-colored egg, the likes of which you'd never find in a grocery store—and enjoy foraging for weeds, bugs, and garden scraps.

The males are spectacular. They're built like tanks with low, heavy breasts, and wear plumage straight out of Chaucer. They have beards like a woodsman, dark and full. Add to that a long, luscious, black stallion tail and a cream-colored saddle
with accents of mahogany, and you can picture them crowing over pilgrims wending their way to Canterbury.

Unlike other roosters, the Salmon Faverolle roosters are a completely different color than the females, yet another anomaly in the chicken world. It makes them easy to sex as youngsters: as their primary feathers grow in and replace the soft baby down, which happens about a week after hatching, you can easily tell the boys from the girls. This is exciting, because an untrained eye usually can't determine the sex of chickens for at least two months. And of course, everyone hopes to hatch out more pullets (proto-hens) than cockerels (proto-roosters).

I had put ten Salmon Faverolle eggs in the incubator. Cost of one dozen fertile eggs: $30. Cost of shipping them from a friendly farmer in Texas: $15. Cost of incubator: $120 (although I managed to con one out of my mother as a Christmas present). Cost of electricity required to keep incubator running for twenty-one days straight: at least $15.

Given my initial investment, I anxiously awaited the moment when I could officially determine the sex ratio of my clutch. I looked at pictures online; I picked the chicks up to hold their feathers up to the light. And each time I did, I thought,
Please tell me you're light brown, and not black
.

After two weeks, there was no denying it. Of my first Salmon Faverolle hatch, six out of eight chicks were male. To add insult to injury, one of the two females was a “sport” (a genetic anomaly)—white-colored instead of salmon. She'd make a fine egg-layer, but if I was trying to keep to the heritage breed standard, hers weren't the genetics that I'd want to pass along to the next generation.

What was there to do, besides go back to the drawing board and order more eggs? And since my incubator held forty
eggs, why not fill it up? I contacted farms and ordered some Salmon Faverolles, Blue Orpingtons, and Buff Orpingtons, and fired up the incubator again.

The surviving seven chickens perched in the small coop. (Hope is second from the left.)

 

 

 

Cockerels, like all young animals, are cute. Roosters, however, are not. In fact, they're parasites. If you retain all of your cockerels and permit them the luxury of turning into roosters, the first thing that will happen is your feed bill will go through the roof and your egg business might not even break even. The second thing that will happen—unless you build an entirely separate coop and yard for the boys, which again is cost prohibitive—is that your hens will be miserable.

As soon as they mature, roosters turn into hungry, noisy, horny, sexually deviant motherfuckers. They will pick out an individual hen and chase her around the coop, yard, pasture,
driveway, and porch until eventually she tires enough to be mounted. They will also gang-rape hens; five or six roosters will chase down a hen together and form a ring around her. After one rooster mounts her, everyone else has to have their way with her, too. During this whole process, the hen—as you'd might expect—is screaming her head off and frantically trying to get away. But she can't, because she's surrounded on every side by more horny roosters.

As if that weren't bad enough, when they mount the hen, the roosters bite the feathers on the back of her head and dig their talons into her back. After only a few weeks of roosterfest, my hens were sporting bare backs and bald spots. They no longer looked like happily free-ranging beauties, but abused factory-farmed critters.

I grew up in a household that eschewed Barbie for her unrealistic, over-sexualized view of the female form. To me, the meaning of roosterfest was clear: patriarchy had set up shop in my chicken pasture. Remember, the gentle hens are the ones who do all the work, passing an egg that comprises 3 percent of their body weight every twenty-six hours. Scaling up, this is the equivalent of a 150-pound woman giving birth to a 5-pound baby every day. Meanwhile, the roosters eat, sleep, shit, crow, fight, and fuck. And all of these processes are repeated at least a dozen times in the course of twenty-four hours.

My rooster-dominated yard was cruel. It was embarrassing when visitors stopped by to see the happy free-range chickens—and instead found themselves explaining to their kids what the roosters were violently doing to the hens. The roosters were inhaling chicken feed, too; a fifty-pound bag disappeared every other day. It had to stop.

I admit, roosters are quite beautiful. And in order to breed heritage chickens I'd need to keep a few of them. But empathy for my hens overcame my general animal empathy, and I realized that an egg-eating vegetarian is essentially a chicken-eating vegetarian, anyway. If you eat eggs, male chickens somewhere are dying. (Ditto, by the way, for most male dairy animals.) With this realization, I'd just grasped a fundamental tenet of livestock management: female animals are useful; male animals are not. Or, more accurately, female animals are useful
alive
while male animals are not.

It would be fine if livestock were magically born in a 1:10 male-female ratio. But they're 1:1, just like the rest of us. (And with my luck, they're 2:1, with the males outweighing the females.) The truth is, you need only a few males to keep a large herd or flock of females going.