The Wonder of Hatching Chicks

A benefit of having roosters, besides how pretty they are, is that when Lily went broody, we could allow her to hatch out a family.

It was a little tricky to keep track of the original eggs. Hens would lay near the straw bed we made for Lily, and when the sister hen walked away, Lily would nudge the egg into her own clutch, adopting it into her family. To keep from indefinite brooding and a loss of half our egg production, Braylon marked six of what he thought were the original eggs. Then, he could identify and then gently pull the adopted eggs out from under mom when he did his daily chores.

So, for 21 days, Lily sat on her six eggs. While the other chickens went out into the woods to scratch and scavenge all day, she would get up once for a drink of water and to eat a little bit of food. She sacrificed all manner of chicken comfort for the greater gift of new life, and she was eventually rewarded.

One morning when Braylon was doing his daily check, he heard peeping under Lily’s feathers. The chicks hadn’t even hatched, but they were announcing their impending entrance into the flock. By the end of that day, we had five brand new babies.

Fluffy heads would poke out from under Lily: Two black, two brown, and one yellow thanks to their mixed genetics. We would peek in at them every chance we got, admiring and cooing as you would with any newborn. I personally could not get over how fast those 21 days had gone.

Just three weeks ago, not even a shell existed. Then, in a matter of hours, five eggs that you could hardly distinguish from those on the grocery store shelf gave way to perfectly fluffy, fully-formed chicks. It felt inconceivable to me that a living thing could form almost out of nowhere.

You’d think I would be used to the miracle of life by now. I’d experienced it, in my own body in fact. But this was different. It was like microwave gestation.

When I was pregnant, it felt like the longest nine months ever, and by the time the baby arrived, I felt I had almost earned a new human after the nausea, aches, and sleeplessness.

Whereas Lily got small on her journey to motherhood, I expanded. A baby was very clearly forming, manifesting herself as a beach ball around my middle.

With these chicks it’s entirely different.

No umbilical cord, no dramatic labor, no stretch marks. Everything needed to create them was bottled up in that shell. They just needed heat and time, and now, they are beings all their own, ready to follow their instincts wherever it takes them. Scratching. Pecking. Running. Roosting. I like to go out to their fence and just watch them, amazed and amused by their antics. I like to smile at Lily, who is still gaining her weight back, just two postpartum moms, neither one quite ready or able to “bounce back.”

This new set of chicks is beginning to shift the way I see the rest of life also, as amazement begets amazement.

The baby whose perfect head rests on my shoulder as she drifts to sleep, the big sister whose imagination gets stronger by the day, the woman who measures butter and sugar and flour to find the perfect chocolate chip cookie, the man who takes walks to clear his mind and plan next steps–all this life too started from nothing and with patience became a whole, complex being.

Now, when I look out my window and watch all these somethings-from-nothings running around the yard, noisy and brilliant, human and fowl, it’s an act of worship. Gratitude and awe well up inside me, and I know there’s no one to thank but the One creating in whispers, always and everywhere.

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This blog post was written in participation of a Blogging Bee—an online gathering reminiscent of the quilting bees and sewing bees of days past when women would bring their work together to create art. If you enjoyed this post about “Beginnings,” take a look at these posts from other farmers, small business owners, homesteaders, and creatives.

Don’t Compare Your Beginning to Someone Else’s Middle

The Beginning

To Run Through a Meadow