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- #371
The eggs all had safety holes, so they shouldn't have suffocated. There was no excess fluid, aside from the usual moisture under the membrane and around the chick. No foul smell or green-looking signs of infection, either. The air sacs all looked good, definitely no fluid there. The two pipped eggs had a slightly drier membrane on top, but maybe because they spent an extra 4 days in the incubator and dried out? Not sure when they died, relative to them drying out. The two eggs without pips had a perfectly moist, translucent, pliable membrane. Moister than that one egg I assisted (that one had a very "ashy" membrane and I had to use a lot of coconut oil to moisten it). Unlike the assisted egg, the others didn't look shrink wrapped though.
I don't find eggtopsies tough or unpleasant at all. They are indeed fascinating. Maybe it's because of growing up on a farm, but I learned early to put a sharp divide between the living animal, and the dead hunk of meat and bones. As soon as the animal dies, it's a science feast of exploring anatomy - something I fell in love with as a child and greatly enjoyed gutting the chickens after grandma chopped their heads off
Farm life also raised my tolerance for grossness quite a bit. So I don't mind getting dirty. I was okay with smells, too, but having been pregnant changed something in my brain and nose and now I get nauseated from bad smells a lot more easily. These eggs didn't smell yet though, so that was a relief. Even though I still don't know why most of them died, the eggtopsies were valuable in that I saw, first hand and for the first time, what the chick looks like curled up in there, where all the body parts go, what an internal pip looks like, and how to follow the anatomy to find the beak. If I ever do this again, I'll be better prepared to assist and troubleshoot because of these eggtopsies. So I'd recommend them to anybody who wants to learn and be better prepared for next time.
I grew up on a farm so I'm not too removed from the cycle of life
It’s my one remaining partridge orp. My husband is joking that it’s looking for its siblings. It couldn’t possibly know it’s one of a kind and be distressed by that, can it? Color-wise, the flock is very diverse and no two are the same. So it doesn’t stand out visually... WTF is wrong with that poor little obnoxious screamer?
