Sick Chicks

‘I'm not going to fall in love with these chicks! I'm not going to fall in love with these chicks. I'm not.’ Prescription: Keep repeating this mantra on and off throughout the day and try - as best you can - cold turkeying contact with any little feathered friends.

As I write this I am sitting at our kitchen table, my lap top in front of me, and a large heat lamp heated plastic container with an ailing chick inside to my right. I am babysitting this chick. Richard is off running errands, picking up various chicken necessities -- RED heat lamps to replace the bright white ones he has which he is convinced keeps them up all night and turns them cannibalistic. This cannibalistic side was made manifest when the ailing chick’s leg was somehow cut and the sight of red blood sent the rest of the chicks into a pecking frenzy and we had to separate them. We’ve administered Neosporin to the cut and attempted to rouse the chick’s spirits. Other than the healing cut, she seems to be in good health, even hearty, though she exhibits signs of loneliness. When ever you get too far away from the container, she begins chirping up a storm, and thus my proximity to her to calm her down.

In between me and the "chick's" plastic container rests a collection of EB White essays that I’ve been reading, the cover picture of which has EB at his typewriter looking to his right where his dachshund Fred sits atop EB's desk looking back at him; both are frozen, sphinx-like, seemingly awaiting the other one’s next move. You could easily substitute me for EB and the chick for Fred and get a snapshot of what's going on here at this moment. The little chick stands and observes me, every once and awhile pecking the side of its container. Maybe it wants out. Or maybe it’s “marked” me as a parent figure and is morse-coding its undying affection for me. “Papa!” (Repeat: I won’t fall in love with these chicks. I won’t fall in love with these chicks.) THIS chick, by the way, is an Australorp. Richard has been indoctrinating me with minutia about the feathered horde now residing in our cellar (and kitchen and soon who knows where) He camouflauges this programming as fun quizzes and contests, getting me to memorize their names so they're personal to me, so my affection for them is cemented, indelible. For instance, an Australorp - this little chick pecking “I love you” from the other side of its plastic emergency care ward - is an Australian version of a Orpington. Isn’t that interesting? Isn’t she cute? (I won’t fall in love with … oh, I’m dead meat.)

Let’s back up a few days.

I picked up the 25 chicks (actually 27. Murray McMurray Hatchery throws in a couple extra for good measure. Aren’t they nice?) from the main post office in White River Junction Sunday night and brought them home in their cardboard carton. Their “uncartoning” I shared with Richard and his family in Arizona via a gmail video chat connection. (Remember Richard was out of town at a family gathering? When I gmailed them, they were all playing cards around a table. It was still day there.) Everyone "ooooed" and "ahhhhhed" as I scooped each chick into their warm new home (heat lamps had been on all day per Richard's instructions.) At the bottom of the delivery crate lay 1 dead chick. She'd been pecked a bit and surely stomped over. I was a little sad; it looked so forlorn down there. Richard toughed right through it, though, telling me to quick count the live ones. "The dead one's dead," he seemed to be saying, “toughen up big baby!” He wanted a live tally, pronto, so I needed to focus! (See, I still characterize Richard as this sweet innocent, almost angelic, even after 15 years of living together. It's that smile of his. And his eyes. His voice. They fool me into thinking he’s nothing but sweetness and kindness. And then I find out the truth again. Oh, but the world can be cruel.)
'There are 25 or 26," I replied. 'It's hard to tell because they won't stand still.'
Richard seemed satisfied with that and wanted to get back to his card game and the last moment’s of his family get together. I hung up. I stuck around the container for a while longer, watching these little chirping fur balls scurry about, these little lives. I kept measuring the height of the heat lamps and checking the thermometer so as to keep the temperature right around 95. It was tough; it would either spike up to above 100 or plummet down to 80. And the first days are pretty crucial for the chick's survival because they're especially vulnerable. I had mixed some Gro Gel Plus with water and spread it on the corn feed and also sprinkled a vitamin solution into the water. They seemed like they were acclimating well, so I went back upstairs, checking in on them every hour or so. There’s a kid in me that loves stirring up trouble, and to satisfy that troublesome side I took one and then another of our cats down in the cellar for a look see. My “kid" must've been sorely disappointed because the cats couldn't've care less. Well, Sofia cared, but mostly for her own safety. She was spooked, squirming around and struggling as if I'd taken her down to the basement in "Silence of the Lambs."

The next morning! Glorious clear blue sky, sun shining, a tease of Spring in the air. The chicks were in fine fettle; all was right with the world. Doorbell. Royce, our next door neighbor, pleasantly dissheveled as always, stood at our door holding pieces of a tiny fan that he'd found and thought would help Richard in his incubation experiment.
'Incubation experiment," I queried, warm and smiling.
"For the geese eggs."
'Geese?' My mood cooled.
"Oh, I guess Richard hasn't told you."
'No'
"Well, now you know!" Royce began cheerily demonstrating the fan on our kitchen counter, but I wasn't listening anymore. A flock of geese had taken roost in my head. Geese. First chickens, then turkeys, now geese! Treachery! Richard’s taking advantage of my good will! We’re going to be living in an aviary! I plumed myself up with righteous indignation. And then ... miraculously ... it went away.  I just let it go, something I would’ve held onto for weeks before. No, if Richard wants an aviary, so be it. We've talked about this. It's his investment. I'll pitch in when I can. I'm employing detachment. After all, my boundaries are clear. I just don't want chicken shit on our front porch. I walked through enough of that last year.

I gmail videoed Richard in Arizona again as he was packing for his flight back home, and gave him a morning look at the chicks, all traces of goose gone, and during our talk I noticed that one of the chicks was looking less energetic then the others. It was hyperventilating and dozy and squatted down close to the floor while the others were scurrying about, or if they too were squatted down, all you’d have to do would be nudge them and they’d immediately pop up and dart away. Not this guy. Or gal. She/he seemed to be in sad shape.
“She’s dehydrated. Try and get her to drink,” Richard urged.
I picked her up gently and dipped her beak down into the water. She shook her face in a bit of bluster, and then drank, tossing her beak back in that little chicken way that looks like tossing shots back at a bar.
“Sometimes you have to teach them to drink,” Richard encouraged from Tempe. “They don’t know how.”
‘Okay’ and I continued. After a few more drinks she seemed a bit more sure on her feet, less wobbly.
“I’ve got to get ready for my flight home,” Richard said, and signed off, sending his love.
I continued my little triage unit and began feeling a sense of pride in my little chick. She was coming back, she was going to make it. She began pluming her matted feathers out, she pecked at some grain. I called Royce back over to get his take on the whole enterprise, wondering if we should quarantine her away from the others. Royce had grown up in our house and, in fact, his family had had a large chicken operation here at one time, with up to 5,000 pullets housed in several large barns, now long gone.
“I’d just main line her.”
‘Main line?’
“Just keep her with the others. She’s coming around. She’ll be fine,” he assured me and left.
But it was not to be. I came back down later in the day and after her initial burst of life, she’d begun failing. I called Richard again, one last check in before his flight, and seeing her he said that he didn’t think she was going to make it, the difference between her and the other chicks was now so great. The rest weren’t ganging up on her, but they’d walk over her. She couldn’t keep her balance. I wished Richard a safe flight and hung up and a defiance rose up in me. I kept urging her to drink. And she’d try, but it seemed to sap rather than strengthen her. She’d sit there in between drinks, trying to cheep. There was barely any sound. Then she'd just sit and gasp. She was trying her best, I thought, and it wasn’t quite good enough.

A few weeks back I’d read EB White’s essay “Death of a Pig” and I now found myself in a parallel universe with that tale, not as prolonged, not as beautifully documented, but it was deeply sad. I hated knowing that this little creature had “suffered in a suffering world.” And I felt a deep affection for it, for its pluck, for its trying to survive. I felt she/he was doing it for me.

Richard arrived late, around 9, tired after a long flight. I’d fixed dinner. Like a country doctor he went down and checked out the flock and the little hurt one.
“She’s dying. She’ll be gone by morning,” he said as he sat down for dinner.
But she was still hanging on the next day. It took her until the afternoon of that day to pass on. We removed her and lay her beside the other dead chick in the delivery carton and planned a future burial. But we were soon distracted by traces of blood on the towel paper at the bottom of the wooden container and spotted our little hurt chick in the nick of time. We nabbed it out, just as one of the rooster chips had not only pecked her leg, but grabbed it in its beak and was tenaciously tugging at it. We slapped him away and airlifted her to safety. There followed a tug of war of our own between Richard and me as we haggled about what kind of container to house her in and then where that housing was to take place. When we decided on the kitchen, we then had to deal with our cats’ curiosity, especially Astrid’s, but they seem to have gotten used to this change in the kitchen layout.


Some time has gone by since I first began writing this. Our Australorp is well on the mend. Her cut is healing nicely and is starting to blend in. Richard got a couple of the more docile chicks from the cellar and tossed them in to keep her company. They all seem to be getting along well, 3 ladies catching up on the recent "medical procedure" over lunch. They still have a long way to go when it comes to dining manners, however; they stand in their feed bowls when they're eating and their water bowls when they're drinking.Honestly! You'd think they were brought up in a barn!

PS: Richard’s geese eggs are late. Somehow they’ve gotten waylaid in the mails and no one knows quite how to track them down. Richard has constructed an incubator out of an ugly old green plastic cooler that had been hanging around in our attic and that I’d been urging him to get rid of for over a year. Now it’s come to good use. It really is quite a contraption he’s concocted; something called a gopher-bator. I don’t know if that’s his name or an adopted one. It’s got levers and dials and thermometers and a light bulb. I think it looks like a Mad Scientist’s version of an Easy Bake Oven, but it’s certainly making him happy. (For his lowdown on all this, check out: the Poultry Chronicles by Buff Orpington.)