The Chicken or the Egg?

On February 17, the Abendroth Hatchery hatched its first group of chickens in 2016. I was in Madison for a pulmonary appointment anyway so, after discussing lungs with my doctor, I headed to Waterloo.  This was all very uneventful, something that is nice for a change. My check in with pulmonary went well, directions to Waterloo were easy to follow, the Abendroth farm was clean; my passengers on the ride home made polite conversation but as they had only made their appearance to the world a few short hours earlier, they were mostly subdued.


This gave me ample time to enjoy the luxury of my own thoughts: specifically is it more impressive that a chicken can lay an egg or that a chicken can come out of an egg?

Obviously, it is really something that a chicken can lay an egg, (even an egg a day, some of them).  Can you imagine?  When I was pregnant with Jettie we had a hen who laid giant eggs that were nearly twice the size of regular eggs.  The eggs were so big they couldn't fit in egg cartons, so I just kept a bowl of absurdly large eggs in the fridge to show to people when they stopped over to our house.  I intended to eat them, but as I reflected on the struggles of that bird pushing out a massive egg whilst waiting for my own giant offspring to leave my body... well those tremendous eggs mostly just made me really uncomfortable.  (Once, we found a teeny tiny egg in the coop. It was about the size of a robin's egg and that egg made me feel great relief, as though that chicken was just like "Ahchoo!  Oh, there's an egg.")

But it is also remarkable that chickens hatch from eggs. Twenty one days of growing inside a little ovoid home and then tiny chickens who have eaten all of their available food start popping through the shells.  They have no muscle, they're completely constrained, they have no idea where they are going- how do they even do it?  Just tap-tap-tap all morning until crack, you're out and you find yourself an unfathomable amount of space and also disgusting.  (Yeah, those darling little fluffy chicks are not adorable upon leaving their egg. Though to be fair who looks their best when covered in yolk after a long workout?)

Later that Wednesday night we took our box full of chickens out to their new home.  By the red glow of the heat lamps, Henry and Jettie claimed their pets (all but two are identical and now they are mostly named Martin) and then lovingly lifted each little light as a feather full of life and promise creature into its new home.  "Count them," I told the kids, this a mistake as two kids counting aloud together invariably precludes accuracy.  Now we will never know how many chicks there are,  definitely more than twenty, fewer than thirty six.   But no matter, at the end of the day we are the proud owners of about thirty of what are arguably the most impressive animals on the planet.