Pipping Babies!!!
This morning I checked on my eggs, and saw this lovely sight:
Only four eggs, but it's really neat to see the babies hatching! Day 62, just like last year!
Yesterday I finally decided that one of my eggs in another clutch that had started to sweat profusely had gone bad. {squeamish folks need not continue}... Here is the egg:
I decided to open it up.... the first slit was small to see if "healthy egg fluit" would surge out.... I don't know how I would describe healthy egg fluid, but it's thicker than water and gel-like but like a very thin gel.... clear, smells like bell peppers. When I got stuff the consistency of water and it was pinkish orange, that told me that the egg was no good, so I proceeded to open it up. This was my first view:
Now this egg was opened 11 days prior to its due date. My thought is that it should have a nearly full term baby in the egg, small, with some developmentally retarded points that attest to it not being fully developed and ready to hatch. (But I do NOT know the growth rate of babies, and when they get color, when anything happens in general, so I could be completely wrong here.) I didn't think that I was seeing an embryo that was 51 days into incubation. To my thought I was seeing a baby that was maybe 30 days, or possibly 40, but certainly not 50. Again, this is NOT a scientific observation based on known development rates of eggs.
I opened the egg up some more and this is what came out. Note a hard-boiled mass on one of the long ends of the egg mass, stuck to the shell. I didn't note (and have since tossed) whether the hard boiled stuff was at the same location as the dark spot on the egg itself before cutting it open.
And finally I pulled the actual baby out from the egg-mass... this is what I saw:
Sadly this morning at least three more eggs in that clutch have started to sweat profusely. Perhaps I shall lose the entire clutch.
They are from the same female who laid the second clutch of 7 eggs.