I Shouldn’t Be Alive- Chicken Edition
You guys remember Lucky, the chick I saved from certain death 4 separate times?! Well here he is, all grown up!! Isn’t he a handsome boy? He may not be to breed standard with his red comb (it should be mulberry colored) but I think he’s a stunner regardless. I may be slightly bias though based on how close we became in his first week of life. I swear this guy has 9 lives and already used up at least 4 of them.
Wanna hear a crazy story about a very lucky chicken?
Four day old Lucky taking a bath to soften his pasty butt situation….
So it all started the day he was born. He had a red bulge coming out of his tummy which, after a quick google search, I learned was his yolk sac. It had not been fully absorbed in the hatching process. Chicks have about a 50/50 chance of surviving the first 3 days of life when this happens. I was very worried he wouldn’t make it, but he did!
A couple days later he developed a bad case of pasty butt. That’s what you call it when the chicks poop gets stuck to the fluff around the vent and builds up. I’d never had that happen to a chick before (this was my first time having a broody mama raise the chicks so I was much more hands off than usual) so I didn’t know what it was until it had already covered his vent and turned into an emergency. He can thank google and a good pair of trimming scissors for saving his life that time around! After getting him all cleaned up I looked into ways of avoiding that in the future and read that I should start giving the chicks scrambled eggs every day to remedy that problem. Problem solved!
Two days after surviving THAT fiasco Mama Hen left him alone too long in the coop and he got too cold. I went out to tend to the chickens and was shocked to find my lifeless little chick laying in the back corner of the brooder coop. I thought he was dead. I took him out and placed him on the dog kennel in the sun while I dug a hole. When I gently picked him up to place him in his final resting place, he twitched! I figured it was a nerve reflex so I put him in the hole anyway and was JUST about to start burying the poor thing when I felt like I should wait. He had to be dead but I couldn’t bring myself to cover him with dirt when he had JUST twitched in my hand a moment ago. I decided to take him out of the hole and give him a little more time, just to be sure. At the very least it would give me peace of mind. I came back into the chicken yard 5 minutes later and he was standing up on top of the dog house and cheeping away! WHAT! Turns out the hot sun warmed his little body and brought him back to life, folks! It was so wild!
And thats the day I named him Lucky.
So that’s his story! What an action packed, first week of life thriller we endured with this lucky guy who clearly has a will to live like none other!