Incubator 2.0
We have baby chicks in the house right now. I can hear the five of them, just three weeks old, softly cheeping while I’m working in my office. They’re quieter than the last two batches of chicks—fewer piercing alarm calls at six in the morning—but they still babble softly to each other all day long. Sometimes I like to imagine what they’re saying. A few of their noises I recognize. There’s the trill that hangs over their head like an exclamation mark whenever I put a new object in the brooder. And the repetitive peep they make when I have to remove a chick from the rest of its flock for even a few seconds. Other than that there’s just the happy peeping of chicks going about their business. It’s calming to sit with them. I’ve been bringing my morning coffee in there so I can wake up to the sounds of what I imagine are them saying I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay. back and forth to each other.
I’m embarrassed to say that it wasn’t until my second flock of chicks that I realized how egg-shaped the babies are just a day or two after hatching. But as soon as I had the thought I realized of course they’re shaped like eggs. Until they hatch, their entire cellular time on Earth was spent inside of an egg. Three weeks in, the chicks aren’t as round or as cute as they were when I first got them though there’s a certain rakish charm to a “tween” chick—half covered in baby down and half in feathers. They seem at once awkward and fierce and so fragile. I remember what it was like to be that age too.
The chicks don’t have a mother so I’m left to fret over them and make sure all their needs are met. They have a heat plate to snuggle underneath for warmth though it’s hard and so inanimate compared to a blanket of feathers with a heartbeat. The chicks have food and water and fresh shavings. They have each other. They grow up just fine like this but I often wonder what they’re missing. I try to peep at them and repeat their noises. I hope I’m saying the words right. Chicken is not a language I speak well though I’m trying. When a chick is being incubated inside of an egg, they develop ears around day twelve of twenty-one. If they had a mother hen, she would talk to her chicks constantly. The same I’m okay. I’m okay. I’m okay. the chicks make to each other but in this case I imagine it’s more like I’m here. I’m here. I’m here. They'd be hearing that with their just developed ears from inside the shell. It's a nice thought but these chicks didn’t have that experience either. They were incubated in an egg tray along with thousands of other chicks in a hot room. The egg trays were turned slightly every so often to keep the chicks from sticking to their shells or developing improperly. It’s why chickens roll the eggs they’re sitting on when they go broody.
We’ve been incubating eggs since the days we now call B.C.E.—so far back that chickens were hardly domesticated before we started raising chicks away from their mothers. Ancient Egyptians used to incubate eggs in mud ovens. They burned animal manure as fuel to keep the eggs warm and people checked the temperature of the eggs by holding them gently against their skin. It probably didn't smell great in there, not that modern incubators, with their sulfurous fumes of overcooked egg, smell much better.
So we’ve had a long time to perfect the process of incubation. Yet the first commercial incubator didn’t appear on the market until 1881. Until then, incubators were bulky things you built yourself and never moved. People did the best they could. In contrast, these commercial incubators looked a bit like small nightstands where the cabinet door opened to reveal a glass front to the temperature-controlled box inside. A French obstetrician named Stéphane Tarnier saw a version of an incubator used to hatch exotic birds at the Paris Zoo and thought perhaps it could help premature babies survive. Babies, of course, do not hatch from eggs so this seems like a bit of a leap. But, like so many new things in the world, infants also require warmth and are so very fragile.
Some hospitals had already tried using so-called “warm cradles” that had hot water running through metal pipes built into the sides but it wasn’t the same as something with a closed lid. Lack of medical knowledge (hand washing was still a somewhat controversial topic among surgeons at this time) of how to save these babies as well as an increasingly prevalent belief that letting premature babies die on their own would strengthen the human species, hadn’t led to much progress for children born early. But the birth rate in France had been falling which led to more support for Tarnier’s child incubator. If there weren’t enough children to go around, maybe it was worth putting in a little effort and helping all of them survive. A few models of these incubators were made for human children. Early results showed that the survival of “infants less than [4.4 pounds] in birth weight could…be increased from 35 to 62 per cent.”
A man named Dr. Martin Couney was studying in Europe when saw these incubators in use and decided to bring them to the United States. At that time, most babies were still born at home and hospitals didn’t see the sense in spending a lot of money to save babies who weren’t strong enough to survive on their own (unfortunately eugenics was quite popular among many scientists and doctors around the turn of the century and this likely had more than a little to do with these priorities). After being rejected by hospitals time and time again, Dr. Couney resolved to find a way to show the public what these incubators could do for premature infants the only other way he knew how—he brought them to the fair.
Dr. Couney set up incubator “shows” at the World’s Fair in New York and charged admission to pay for the equipment and staff needed to keep these babies alive. Frantic parents, given no better options from the hospital, put their children in Dr. Couney’s care, and visited their children among a crowd of fascinated spectators. In 1903, Dr. Couney opened a more permanent exhibition at Luna Park in Coney Island. Though he charged visitors 25-cents to see the babies, the care—which included doctors and nurses looking after the infants—was free for parents. One of Dr. Couney’s “incubator babies”, a woman named Linda Horn, was only 2-pounds when she was born in 1920. As she told NPR, the hospital staff had no interest in even trying to keep her alive. "They didn't have any help for me at all," Horn recalled. "It was just: You die because you didn't belong in the world."
When he finally closed the incubator exhibits in the 1940s, Dr. Couney claimed he’d had an 85-percent success rate with raising the infants in his care and had saved over 6,500 of them during his career. There’s no telling how many people must have gone down to the Coney Island boardwalk for a hot dog and some sun and stopped in to peer at the strange infant exhibit. But Dr. Couney finally achieved his goal of having this technology accepted by hospitals, some of which had even created special neonatal units by the time he retired. It’s a wild story and you can read more about it in Dawn Raffel’s book The Strange Case of Dr. Couney.
It’s funny to think that the very incubators which seem to so coldly coax chicks out of their eggs wound up saving so many human lives. That we worked on this technology for thousands of years to raise chickens more easily before we thought to apply it to our own species. Now that I know the story, I can’t help but think of chicks every time I hear about premature babies and visa versa. I’m not the only one. In Berlin, they referred to an early exhibit of incubator babies as a kinderbrutanstalt or “child hatchery.”
News from the Coop!
The big news of course is that we have five tiny new flock members in the house (literally--the chicks live in our upstairs bathroom). Scully, Phryne, Olivia, Miss Marple, and Harriet are getting bigger every day and it's so fun to see their feathers come in and watch them figure out how to use their new wings. Three of the five happily flutter up to the rim of the brooder and perch whenever I take the lid off. You can see plenty of pictures of them on Instagram!
Meanwhile there have been some changes in the big coop. Dolly has finally recovered from wry neck enough to go back to the coop full time. It's been six weeks and I've been really worried about whether she'd ever recover. I'm keeping a close eye on her (and lots of extra snacks) to make sure she's getting enough to eat to keep her going in the right direction.
Of course because there's always something going on with the chickens, Peggy went broody the day after Dolly went back to the main coop. So we still have a large chicken in the house. Peggy is not terribly pleased about this turn of events and has been shrieking at us like a basement gremlin every time I walk past.
Poultry News
A few weeks ago I noticed that my backyard chicken groups were full of stories from people who wanted chicks and couldn’t get them anywhere. I realized it was a nationwide trend (actually worldwide because I’ve seen reports of the same from the UK and Australia) and wrote about it for The New York Times.
Due to increased demand related to Covid-19 shopping, eggs were in short supply this easter. [The Counter]
Chicken thefts on the rise due to egg (and chick) shortages related to coronavirus. [Kent Online]
Spain has been notably strict in keeping its residents indoors, prompting some people to walk unusual pets like goldfish and chickens just to go outside. [Daily Examiner]
If you see chickens in the news or know a good chicken tip, please email it to me: underthehenfluence@gmail.com
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Until next month!