Chick Drama

When I left you last, we were waiting with great hope for some eggs to hatch in our incubator.



I am not sure whether our attempt should be defined as success or not. I am leaning toward not...



We did get a chick!
It hatched three days late, from the egg that I had mentioned before. If you remember, when I talked to it on the morning of its projected hatching date, it had rolled itself over.
Little farm girl heard its peeps and found it at about 5am and was so excited we couldn't get her back to bed. She has been mothering it non stop and is simply delighted. "Beep" goes for stroller rides, has his own little purse to ride in on outside farm adventures and loves to eat the mosquitoes she catches for him.



Now for the unsuccessful part. On day 17 I candled the eggs for the last time and there was life in all of them. Out of 21 eggs, two chicks cracked their shells and only one hatched. That is pretty disappointing. Before I threw the eggs out I had a peek in them. All perfectly formed chicks, little feet, little beaks, some had even broke through the membrane and had breathed their air pocket inside the eggs.

The incubator we are using is borrowed from someone we know who was only able to get one chick out of it. This is our second try at it. The first try yielded no results. I discovered a problem with the ventilation and I remedied that with the hope that that was our problem before. We got much farther but I think how I regulated the vents still was not good enough to retain the humidity. After this attempt I went online and reviewed this particular brand of incubator and found many terrible reviews from people that have spent much, much more time than us and still not been able to make a go of it. It is a still air incubator with no fan and I found experiments from people saying that the temperature could vary by more than 5 degrees in places in the incubator and if one egg happens to be in just the right spot you can get a hatcher.

I guess the good thing is, now we know what to look for in our own incubator. It was very exciting to see this little guy hatch and I could see us hatching our own to replace our flock as we need too. Next try will be with an incubator of our own and hopefully it will be a more positive experience.

And a bit more bad news. The little guy who hatched came out with a funny foot. His little toes were all curled together and he wouldn't walk on them. After consulting the internet we built a little "shoe" out of cardboard and a bit of band aid to straighten out his foot.
His foot looked much better but he still wouldn't walk on it. He would sit on his tail and use (what I think of as) his hock joint to walk on, with the little foot and shoe sticking up in the air in front of him. Finally I taped that hock joint with a bit of stiff tape and he started to walk on that foot.
Still it didn't look right. Finally I stumbled across a video of a chick with Perosis, or a slipped tendon in its leg. It looked exactly like Beep. It happens when the bones and cartilage don't form enough to make a groove for the tendon to sit in the right place and caused (of course) by unstable incubation temperatures. I have yet to find a success story of a chick really recovering. I have learned how to massage the leg and get the tendon back in the right place and then I wrap the little Q tip sized leg with vet wrap. I can't get the tendon to stay in place and his little hock is still swelling. Sound like most people end up putting the chick down.

Beep in his chick shoe, see how he sits back on that hock

Today I gave him a try without the wrap, he is pretty good at getting around with one leg.

I have felt a little sick ever since I read about it. Even as I write this, Little farm girl is sitting with the little guy nestled into her lap and describing in great detail every picture of her library book to him. We did the right thing by stretching it and wrapping right away and he does look a little tiny bit better... I sure hope...  but I have a sense of dread...
He is a pretty friendly little guy despite all this. I am getting pretty used to walking into the kitchen and seeing a little head pop up and little peeps filling the room.

 Here is some other pictures from the farm over this week.

The first day it has been hot enough to make mud!

I love watching them discover something that is such a joy to a pig!

Popcorn does this weird thing with Tonka. She rolls on her and jumps on her. I have never seen any of the others do it.

She will climb right on Tonka and then slide off

 


Demonstrating their bubble blowing techniques. Its amazing that they just come with all these pig skills.

Love those eyelashes

I can see why people want pet pigs. They are insanely cute when they are not destroying things, escaping or wrestling over who gets the best spot at the trough. 





And this week I have had some of the best pork of my life. We finally bought ourselves a barbeque. It had been on our list for a very long time and I am so glad we did. This picture is some BBQ pork chops my Dad grilled for us. Wow.

Last night I made a special dinner from our ribs. I slow cooked them all day until they were falling apart and then lightly barbequed them in my very favorite, stickiest, homemade barbeque sauce. I cannot find a word to describe how good they were. The juicy, tender Berkshire meat falling off the bones. The sauce; sweet, tangy and garlicky and crystallizing perfectly on the edges. It doesn't get any better than that!