Saturday, April 11, 2009

Incubator Update

Wednesday morning Emma was sure that she had lost a chick. It is one of the ones that is due to hatch on Tuesday. The other eggs of that batch are so full of chick that you can't see anything through the shell anymore. No light can get through. But this one was definitely different. She couldn't even see veins anymore.

That evening she had gotten over the loss enough to open the egg. After studying the remains of the embryo, she compared it to online pictures of day-by-day chick development. I think she decided that it had died between the fourth and fifth day of incubation. I didn't want to see it, but it was important to her, so I did. She showed me its eyes--one more developed than the other--the little opening of a beakless mouth. When she first studied the embryo, she thought she could distinguish the beginnings of legs, but by the time I saw the it, it was coming apart, and we couldn't discern any legs.

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