by Darcy Dean
“There’s a pip! It’s right there!” I exclaimed. It was almost time for me to go to bed, but I was taking one last look at the Serama chicken eggs that were in our incubator before I went upstairs. They could hatch at any time now, and we had been checking on them almost constantly. “Where?” my brother called back. I pointed to the spot where I had seen the first evidence of an egg hatching. We named the eggs before we had put them in. This one was named Eric. The entire family gathered closely around the incubator and watched as a tiny egg tooth chipped a circle around the entire top edge of the egg. We could hear its peeping and see it rocking the egg as the tiny chick struggled out of its shell. My brother and I refused to go to bed until the chick came out of its egg.
You see, this was an incredibly special chick. Our only hen, Butterscotch, had just died, and we were hoping to get another hen by incubating the last of her eggs. As I mentioned earlier, this chick was named Eric, but we were hoping for a girl chicken to whom we were going to give the name Emma. The reason that these eggs were so special is because they had been in the fridge. The very last eggs that we had gotten from her were put into the fridge to keep them until we ate them, but we had no idea that she would be brutally attacked by our dog, ND, later that day. As soon as we found out what had happened, we took the eggs out of the fridge and let them thaw on the counter. Then, we put them into the incubator and allowed them to incubate for twenty days.
The end of those twenty days is where our story takes place. It took about nine hours for the little chick to escape the confines of its egg and we had all eventually gone to bed. We woke up the next morning to find a fuzzy little chick sitting inside the incubator. The other six eggs had not shown any signs of hatching, but we left them in the incubator for another few days. In the meantime, we quickly put together a place for the chick to stay. We took a large box and put shavings in the bottom. We got very small dishes of food and water and put them in there, as well as a heat lamp because chicks need a lot of warmth. We put the box in our tack room, but Eric spent a lot of time in our laps in a towel as well. None of the other eggs ever showed any signs of hatching. Eric was the only one to survive the fridge and hatch out in the incubator.
Slowly Eric got bigger, and he began to lose his chick fuzz and gained his adult feathers. He was still in the box, but we were waiting to put him into the coop with the other chickens. At this time, we were starting to be able to tell his gender and we had all agreed that Eric was a boy. We were a little bit disappointed that he was a rooster and not a hen, but it was all right because we got another hen from our friends who had given us our original chickens. Her name was Copper. She was an older chicken and was immediately put into the chicken coup with our other rooster Angus. Eric was still not quite ready to go into the coup yet so he stayed in the tack room.
Eric got to hear his name a lot in the early stages of his life, and he took up the habit of squawking at me whenever I opened the tack room door and said his name. We would all laugh and I found it cute. Eventually, when we did put him in the coup with the other chickens, he continued this habit but instead of just squawking, he would fly to me from wherever he was and land on my arm. I thought that this was the coolest thing ever! Every time I would go outside, I would call, “Eric, chicken!” and he would respond with a call of his own, and he would fly to me. Eric and I became best friends, and he would follow me around outside wherever I was. He would also stand at my front door and squawk at it whenever I was inside, and he would not go away until I came out.
All good things must eventually come to an end though. In this story, the end was a tragic accident that occurred when the chicken coup was left open. The coup sits at the very edge of the woods at our house, so predators have convenient access to it. This was a major design flaw that spelled the end of our entire flock of chickens, which consisted of about eight chickens at that time. It was an incredibly sad morning when we came outside to the tragedy that had taken place overnight. My beautiful chicken, who had defied all odds and hatched out of his egg when he had spent time in the fridge, had met his demise. Never again would I hear his elegant squawk when I stepped out of the car and have a chicken flying directly at my arm. One thing that I will always have, however, are memories. Eric will rest in our hearts forever.
Below: Eric the chicken. Courtesy of the author.
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