Science Unplugged

Raising quail wasn’t all work.  Every summer we entered our birds in the County Fair and every year we won Best in Show.   Not because our quail were the best but because they were the only quail entered.

We had created educational displays about what quail ate and how they lived in the wild for the kids. One day the principle of a local private school stopped at our fair booth and asked if I could to do a presentation to the science class.  She also asked if they could hatch quail eggs in the classroom like they could chicken eggs.  The classroom incubator was the same type I used to start my quail business so I told her I thought it would work.

The presentation went well and I don’t know who was more excited about the hatch, me or the kids.  Every day I stopped by after school hours to check the temperature and humidity.  The eggs were scheduled to hatch on a Monday so I stopped in the Friday before to get everything ready for the big event.  Early Monday morning the principle called to say something was terribly wrong and could I come right away.  When I got there a familiar smell greeted me – dead chicks.  I ran over to the incubator and saw some of the eggs half open and some that were fully hatched but dead.

We quickly cleaned out the dead and dying chicks and tried to get rid of the smell before any kids arrived.  I was horrified and could not figure out what had gone wrong.  Everything looked perfect on Friday. Even though a few chicks hatched and survived that day, they asked me to remove the incubator immediately after school.  Since I didn’t seem to know what had happened they were not willing to risk finding any more dead chicks the next morning.

I didn’t think I could ever show my face at the school again until the principle called and apologized.  The weekend before the hatch the janitor mistakenly unplugged the incubator to plug in the floor polisher.  The sudden drop in temperature and humidity caused the initial carnage.  Once the temperature was back to normal the rest of the chicks were able to hatch.

 They hatched chickens the following year and that was just fine with me.