All's well that ends well?

In the last brood of chicks to come out of the incubator, there were a fair number that failed to hatch.  Two of these started hatching, and then the chicks died before emerging.  They seemed to have rotated in their shells (a motion required for successful natural hatching) without having adequately chiseled through the shell as they turned, thereby suffocating against the wet shell membrane.  Hatching, like birth for mammals, is a perilous passage governed by good egg-crafting genes on the hen's part and by a finely-tuned series of instincts on the chick's part.  As tragic as these near-successes always seem to those of us eagerly peering in the top of an incubator to monitor progress, there is no getting around it:  any bird that can't successfully hatch from its egg cannot be considered a successful bird.

Most of the rest contained what appeared to be fully formed chicks without any clues as to why they failed to complete their journey.  It is not unusual to have a few chicks per hatch in this situation, but this was a higher fraction--around a third--than is typical.

The only clue as to what may have gone wrong came from one that successfully hatched.  There was one among the group that managed to emerge from the egg in an entirely unconventional pattern, probably aided by a thinner-than-typical shell thickness.  The wet hatchling struggled to gain its feet, as do all chicks.  But its struggles were accentuated by a peculiar posture.  We were bustling around tidying up for the wedding on that gorgeous, cool and sunny spring day but every time I passed the incubator I looked in on it; I never saw it with its head raised.  It found comfortable positions among the warm unhatched eggs, as new chicks do, but usually ended up with its head positioned downward, often comically out of sight.  When it attempted walking, it would usually topple, stepping on its beak or tripping over its neck.  In general it seemed to have little to envy, but it was preternaturally good at somersaults!

It soon became clear that this was not a problem that was going to go away.  As the chick dried off and joined its broodmates, it never did gain the ability to lift its head, and it seemed unable to open its left eye.  It spent nearly all its time sleeping.  I never saw it eat or drink or join in the group cuddle.  It still couldn't seem to walk where it wanted to go.  This was not going to end well; we all could tell that.

For wild birds, this kind of story finishes simply:  the hen and the rest of the brood must leave the nest and find food.  Chicks like this one can't keep up, or perhaps don't even try, if the impairment is severe.  They soon chill and die, if they aren't found by a lucky predator first.

For this particular chick, I judged that there were two possibilities:  death by deprivation or an intervention for mercy's sake.  So the question became, for me, one of timing.  We had been planning to give it one more night to see if the condition would show signs of clearing up, but when no improvement was evident after a day of waiting, and after we decided to head out last evening for our weekend away rather than this afternoon, the writing was on the wall.

***

It was raining when I carried the warm, soft chick out into the darkness.  I kept it wrapped in my hand and tucked into my side against the damp chill as I switched on the head lamp and made my way through the night to my garden shed to retrieve a pruner.  There could be a thousand ways to do this, but I prefer to use a tool with which I have long experience:  I need all the confidence I can get.  I have by now killed probably hundreds of chickens; It's not the same to kill a day-old chick.

Maybe it's the inner tension of this kind of thing that pushes me toward making a ceremony of it.  In any case I instinctively wanted to find "the right place" to do it.  I settled on the brush pile up behind the wood shed.  Was it because of brush piles being places where death (in the form of discarded tree parts) breeds life (in the form of fungi, woodchucks, and Carolina wrens)?  With raindrops flashing in and out of the headlamp's beam, still cradling the chick in my hand against the rainy night, I ended its short, unfortunate life.  I laid it on the decaying sticks and waited for the last impulses to fade.  I considered picking up the lifeless chick and tossing it out into the dark woods (no sense spoiling the wedding for some hapless, wandering guest), but found I couldn't.  Instead I discovered that I wanted to cover it.  I found the nearest green vegetation--some garlic mustard, maybe some honeysuckle shoots--and laid a layer of it over the fluffy, still-warm form.  Then I turned and left it to its cooling and its decay, and made my way back into the warm, bright house, and the warm arms of my family.