Good & Bad...

Good: One of the eggs in the incubator is pipping, 48 hours early! Hopefully the chick is formed enough to survive, and we're working on moving the cam over to the incubator & off the 25 day old chicks. There are 50 eggs in this batch, and candling the other day showed that some were clear (never developed), some had shells too dark to tell, and others had dark masses inside that meant chicks--alive or dead, we cannot tell.

We're back to Stickam for this hatch:

http://www.stickam.com/chickam2008

Bad: We just lost one of our favorite hens, Beast, to some damned mystery illness that stumped us, our fellow chicken owner friends, AND our vet. Best he could say was that he thought it was something bacterial in nature. Seems no amount of Lasix and Baytril could save her, and the best I could do was to pet her, talk to her and be with her as she went. Meanwhile, Louise and Houdini, who caught it first and were deathly ill, have recovered and are fine.

This is extra depressing since yesterday Beast had turned a corner and was walking around the house, talking and eating up a storm on her own, we felt we just needed to fatten her up a bit and she'd be fine. :(

EDIT:  We later realized that we had had a sudden infestation of weird black & orange caterpillars on our Curly Willow tree several days before the hens got ill.  We knocked them down for the chickens, and only three hens had actually eaten any...Beast, who ate the most, and Louise and Houdini.

So yeah, poison caterpillars, it seems.