When confronted by baby chicken (a.k.a chicks) deaths, my man and I have a different approach. I immediately channel my German nana, raised on a farm in Germany and living through World War Two. 'It's just nature', I shrug. As soon as my heart skips a beat, the walls of steel come down. Chick corpses get tossed in the compost or buried in the garden with little fuss. The baby chick that's looking half dead has to - well, live or die. Yeah, baby chicks as cute as this one.
But my husband has a different approach.
When faced with a chick that is basically a splattered blob half buried by straw because it's too weak to stand and wobbe after the warmth of Mama's feathery skirts, he goes into rescue mode. Half dead baby chicks gets dropper fed honey water by his tender hands, snuggles with him on the couch, and is nursed by Mama Hot Water Bottle and a towel in a box overnight. He names them - last year it was Katie, who became a rooster, and this year it's Button. You have to love a man who calls a baby animal Button and nurses it to life with tender hands.
'It's your responsibility' I say. 'And if it dies, you're dealing with it.' Secretly, my heart is melting. You cannot wish a fluffball to die. You just can't. And so baby Button is brought into bed with us in the morning, and is forgiven for shitting on the sheets. It (because maybe it's a roo, not a hen) gathers strength until finally it weakly stands. I put her next to Mama Hen, who clucks and invites her in. She wobbles and slides across the straw and under her mother's feathery skirts. I worry she'll get trod on, because her mum is a hefty hend with big feet who squashed four of her babies before they were strong enough to squawk and evade her.
As hard ass as I am, I still check Button every hour. The man calls from work: 'Is Button okay?' and is relieved to hear she (it) is. We almost bring her in for another night, just in case she gets squished. One of her siblings did the night before, a cold corpse which gets buried under a newly planted tomato. Instead I go out at night and make sure Mama's feet aren't squishin' nobody. All seems okay in the nursery.
And then life goes on, in all it's fluffy tiny glory. Motherclucker does what chickens have been doing since the egg beget the chicken, or vice verse. She has one cluck for a warning, another for 'come to me', another for 'come eat the oats I found for you', and another for 'stop biting your sister's wing'. She tolerates me because I bring food for her babies. She clucks when I picks them up, checks I'm not biting their heads off, and tends to the others. Despite the fragility of life, and the deaths of five chicks that barely saw out a day, and the fox that creeps closer despite the magpies screeching overhead, life does go on, as they say.
Death happens, so it does. But so does life. Without the first, the second would not be so magical.
With Love,
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