Dozens of photos of hatching chicks

 Hatching Chicks: The Definitive Collection.

The moral of this story (and the moral of all my posts about farm animals) is: animals are better than people. Actually, that should probably be the title of my blog.

 As soon as the little dark one hatched, he ran straight under his mom.

 The new daddy comes to check on his family. Just a few days later, this rooster was taken by foxes. We spent an hour searching the woods for his remains--a few brown feathers.

It was such a surprise to find the first peeping baby in the nesting box, right on time, three weeks after we gave the eggs back to the brooding hen. Though I'd been expecting them to hatch, it was funny and weird to find this little visitor where there'd been a humdrum everyday-looking egg just an hour before.

A photo and a story

We drew those permanent-marker lines around the center of the eggs to remember that they were fertilized and not for eating. Of the nine eggs, seven hatched nicely on exactly the day we expected. One didn't hatch at all--maybe it hadn't been fertilized at all. And one started to hatch in the wrong direction--splitting open along the latitude, not the longitude. We could see the wet chick inside but didn't want to help it along. Iris told us to make sure to gather up the unhatched eggs because they would spread disease to the new chicks, but we lost track of that semi-hatched egg amidst the hay. Two days later, I found it--squashed completely flat, and the little chick inside it just a flat, sticky pancake. I carried it on a board to the trash.