Early in the New Year, I ordered some fertile chicken eggs to hatch in my small incubator. I often do this to replace old laying hens or inject new breeds or genetics into my flock. It also provides my children with a beautiful opportunity to learn how to care for baby chicks, not to mention teaching them about life cycles and where our food comes from.
I ordered a dozen Araucana eggs, a breed of chicken that originates from Chile and is known for their blue-shelled eggs and friendly nature. They make great pets and the kids love the blue eggs nestled amongst the brown eggs of our ever-reliable ISA Brown.
This time I chose a new egg supplier, one whose birds win prizes at chook shows with the hopes of gentrifying my chicken flock.
The eggs I received were tiny. I realised too late that the breeder’s chooks were the bantam variety and lay sparrow eggs, which are about as useful as spatchcock… In that they taste the same but fail to fill your stomach.
After three weeks of careful incubation, a measly single egg hatched. My two young children were still very excited – as they always are – for a little chicky to cuddle. The chick was a tiny little morsel of bones and fluff and coveted to the point where I needed to use an egg-timer to distribute cuddling rights.
Fast forward a week and my three-year-old was having her allotted cuddle time while I hung the washing. My eldest interrupted me with, “Muummm, she’s putting the chicken in the water”, in a bored kind of tone as if this kind of thing happens all the time – which look, it does.
Luckily, it was a very shallow puddle made from watering the garden. Nevertheless because the chick was so young, it started losing body heat quickly and would have died within an hour had I not carefully blow-dried it to warm it up. I popped it back in its cage under the heat lamp to rest, then packed up the kids to visit friends in Sydney for the evening.
Later, as I lay reading in bed, my husband came in asking, “Is there supposed to be a chick in the cage?”
My heart dropped. I went to investigate and just as he said, no sign of the chick and no sign of tampering with the secured and latched cage.
I did a quick check of the yard, already knowing I wouldn't find it and already knowing how it had disappeared.
The chick had a fatal visit from a butcherbird.
If you haven’t heard of the butcherbird before, you have probably heard its call, which is high pitched and has a familiar association with the Australian bushland. The birds are in the same family as magpies and they are just as aggressive, though not so much towards humans.
They are known to skewer their prey on sticks or between branches as a type of bird ‘larder’ to hold their dinner (usually a reptile, small mammal, large insect or bird) in place while they eat it, or offer it as a mating gift or for savsies as a later snack.
Australian bird owners know them as the vicious songbirds come hither to scalp their pet budgie.
Butcherbirds are known to lure birds (particularly budgies and cockatiels) to the edge of their cages, where they use the sharp hooked point on the end of their strong beak to pull pet birds, or parts of them, through the bars of their cage, like a fast food pick-up.
I actually really like butcherbirds and their beautiful songs when they're not trying to kill my pet birds. I have had at least six past run-ins with the black-headed, grey birds in my life. My poor childhood budgie survived two attacks before finally succumbing to his injuries from a third at the ripe old age of 16. I have never had problems with them stealing chicks before, and I’ve hatched a lot of chicks.
There is no real moral to this story other than the acknowledgement of the short life and tragic death of a little chick who survived being cooked alive in a pretend microwave, who then survived being plunged into a cold puddle, only to be eaten by a butcherbird hours later.
Sometimes I wonder about the balance between the benefits of exposing my children to the animals of this world and the drawbacks of exposing these animals to my children. Despite the obvious benefit of familiarising my children with non-human creatures, they are inevitably and inadvertently cruel in their quest to understand the world around them and how to be in relationship with those creatures.
Thinking back to my own childhood, I cringe to think of the guinea pigs we released into the dam to see if they could swim. I have sworn not to let my kids enact naive cruelty on their animals but my experience so far has shown me that I cannot possibly be vigilant enough to curb every questionable action towards the pets.
Perhaps the guilt that laces my memory at my own misendeavours with animals is the echo of an important rite of passage in childhood that teaches empathy for animals outside of oneself and the conceptualisation of the consequences for our actions. I knew that me releasing the guinea pig into the water was the reason I woke up to its still, cold body the next morning and, riddled with guilt, I never did it again. And I’d be willing to bet nearly all of us have similar stories of unfortunate actions against our childhood pets.
I am, of course, not advocating a loosening of supervision vigilance. And perhaps these musings are simply a way to abdicate my guilt for the chick's life and death. But I’d also like to think that it’s a broad and forgiving standpoint for parents caring for kids and pets simultaneously. A little compassion for the realities of life with small kids and animals.
The whole situation sparked conversations about caring for our animals, life, death and the animal kingdom with my kids that became the gift in the little bird’s death.
Rest in dry, warm, butcherbird-less Peace, Ducky.
