Quite familiar with wilco, and as feed stores go they're really pretty good to work with and how they care for their chicks and whatnot.. in fact many many years ago I was the chick girl at one of their locations. Honestly, I would suspect shipping stress causing the chick just to be set up for eventual death from the beginning. It's not the fault of the Hatchery the store or honestly you, it just the unfortunate outcome that happens when you look at everything that happens to and with those chicks from the moment they hatch to the moment they end up in your brooder.. a series of stresses. Most of them handle it fairly well and bounce back and go on to thrive, but there is a percentage of them that just aren't going to be able to do that. The real kicker is, they can look just fine when they come out of the box, they can look just fine when you're at the store looking at them in their temporary brooder and they can even look just fine for several hours or longer when you get them home.. but eventually you're going to hit the four or five day old mark (usually about the time they've been in your care for a day or so.. or maybe right around the time you're bringing them home from the store )and those reserves that the chick was drawing on to get them through the first few days are completely exhausted, the chick has failed to be hydrating and taking a nutrition to replace that and eventually you hit the tipping point where that chick goes downhill very fast and honestly at that point there's not a whole lot that can be done to bring them back from the brink and have them not be at least somewhat compromised from then on... showing in yes the chicken survived and feathered and grew and produced.. but was always just a little bit less able to fight things off always just a little bit compromised so that when things came around through the flock that chicken is going to be the one that really gets symptomatic and really struggles to bounce back again
