The phone rang around 7 AM, and the caller ID said United States G. I checked Sam’s bedroom before I called back–when the government calls, you want to know where your teenager is–and it turned out to be the Post Office, with chicks.
The label on the box said ‘hatched on 4/25/08 at 8:36:57 PM’ and the notation from the Post Office was ’4/28 called 6:48 AM’, less than two and a half days after they hatched. They were all very perky.
The first few hours after they arrive they need to learn how to eat and drink. The directions said to lay newspaper over the woodshavings and sprinkle the paper with food, so they learn how to eat chick mix instead of wood shavings. The water is spiked with a little sugar, and the instructions say to dip each chick’s beak in water. I don’t know if I get them all, but everyone is having a ball, peeping, scampering, pecking and drinking. Two times different chicks sat down for a while, looking weak, and I picked it up and dipped its beak in water, and it shook itself off and got busy eating and drinking again.
They are ridiculously cute (I like the feathered legs).
and very busy.
Sam said, did you ever wonder how they sent us 25 males? Japanese guys squeeze out the chick’s poop and look up their butt to sort them. Really. You should look it up.
So I googled “chick sexing”, fearing for the worst. But there it was in Wikipedia, a listing for chick sexing that told the story of the professional vent sexer, typically Japanese, who turns the chick upside down and squeezes out feces to open the cloaca, allowing the sexer to see the male’s small bump. “The professional vent sexer has studied their external appearance, which can fall into as many as fifteen basic patterns, and learned to identify which ones are male and which female.” So some time after 8:36 last Friday night, someone was looking for bumps up these newborn chick butts.
Strange territory.
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