Friday 9 May 2008

Survival of the fittest


Tonight has been manic at Rock HQ. It looks like that tomorrow is the day that the stable is finished, the build project has run as long as this web page is almost complete.
So alongside the usual jobs we took a delivery of 70 bales of hay, these had to be moved into the empty pig sty.
But hows this for determination.
Chicken eggs take 21 days to incubate, so we have been waiting to see what hatches out from all the eggs collected after the murder most fowl episode, 21 days wondering if any of the eggs contain Winniecott hens. Now I have already explained how the incubator works and the suicidal tendency of the hatched chicks.
But tonight's takes the prize for most committed to killing itself.
21 days to hatch.
21 hours to get out of the egg.
Finally free it spent the next 21 minutes of its life jumping over the egg barrier in the incubator. These barriers divide the incubator up into sections where the eggs rotate slowly. So it jumped a barrier, equivalent to you or I clearing an 8 foot wall. It landed in another row of eggs where it clambered over the next barrier. Once there it forced itself through a half inch gap, the gap between the floor of the incubator and the sides of the incubator box. Now underneath the floor it followed the edge of the box, climbed over the side of the water container that keeps the humidity of the box just right.
And drowned.
21 seconds later.

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