Thursday, April 25, 2013

Curly's Bad Hair Day


Good news about the chick that struggled for over twenty four hours to get out of his shell.  He's alive!  His first day was a bad hair day, for sure, but he is strong, active, and seems to have all the right parts in all the right places. 


After letting him try to get out on his own for an entire day, and restraining myself from assisting, I was disappointed to come back to the office the next day to see that he was still in the shell.  He did have one foot out, which was progress, but the membrane of the egg surrounding the crack in the egg was dried up, brown, and stuck to his feathers.  I think this was sort of gluing him in the shell.  I took the photo above after I peeled off the dried membrane and set him back down.  Being handled freaked him out enough that he made some powerful kicks.  Out he popped! 


He was so gross!  His wispy feathers were glued to his body, which really emphasized the round shape of his abdomen.  Ew.  In the photo above he had just rolled out of the shell and was catching his breath before he stood up and began to stumble around in the incubator.  If you look close you can see the the cord attaching his belly to the membrane of the egg.  So cool. 

I named him Curly, after a friend who developed a special bond with the hatching egg, and who bravely picked him up out of the incubator, despite his bad hair and despite not knowing how to grasp a wobbly chick.  Poor Curly, after all his brave struggles he even got to have an adventure on the way home from the office too. He was quite upset to be in a lonely cardboard box without his accustomed 97 degree heat, so I stuck him inside my jacket while I was driving. He was getting settled in and tickling my tummy when he slipped from my jacked to the floor and rolled under the seat. Fishing for chickens under my seat while driving is more dangerous than texting, so I had to leave him there until I could pull over for gas. When I finally found him, and put him back in his box where he couldn't kill us both, he was quite excited and demonstrating that he has great lungs.


Just in case you were wondering, as someone else was, yes, chickens do have lungs.  I've seen them when poking around inside a chicken during butchering, so the confidence in my answer was based on some first hand experience.  Actually, chicken lungs look very similar to a cats lungs, which  I have seen several times in anatomy classes.  In class we stuck straws in the cats lungs and blew in them to watch them inflate, but for some reason  I haven't tried that with a chicken yet.  A chicken does have lungs, but a chicken's respiration is different from a mammal, like us.  Birds have one-way air flow, meaning they can get fresh air with oxygen from inhalation and exhalation, unlike us, who only get fresh air on the intake and then expel old air.  A birds lungs are connected to air sacks that allow this one-way system to function, and to really get a grasp of how this works you have to stare at some diagrams, but the advantage is obvious to an animal that has to do prolonged exercise like flying.  Maybe I could jog if I had bird lungs. 

Anyway, we made it home and Curly quickly settled in with his sisters and his hair is looking much better today.  Not good yet, but better.   

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