There Was No Hopa for Oprah!

This a story of our beloved chicken named Oprah.

For a school project we - my three friends and I - decided to hatch chicken eggs. I got 8 eggs from a family friend and we began the incubation process.

We all picked eggs and drew faces on them and immediately became attached to the idea of having baby chicks running around. Every day we checked up on our eggs and made sure that they had water and that the heat was somewhat right.

Now let me explain something first. We had a pretty modern incubator but for some crazy reason we were just stupid and for the life us we could not figure out how to work it. So for a whole week and a half the temperature was at 93.3 degrees Fahrenheit. Later it rose to 97.3 degrees but it was still not enough obviously. We knew that this would probably affect our eggs and our hopes of them hatching were slowly deteriorating.

Finally a couple of days before they were set to hatch, one of my partners accidentally figured out how to work the incubator.

So for those final days in the incubator the temperature was where it was supposed to be at.

The eggs as expected did not hatch on the exact date but instead, one of them was barely pipping on that day. So, two days later it was starting to come out of its shell.

Our teacher advised us to help it come out of its shell and we did. We took off part of the shell and then left it there overnight. The following morning our chick had fully come out of the shell by itself.

We thought of names and finally chose to name it Oprah after Oprah Winfrey. So we had no idea what to do with it and we had not, I repeat, we did not do any research ahead of time. We had no idea what to do and our teacher told us to leave it in the incubator so we did.

The thing was that it had already gone three days without food or water. So the next morning we came into school and it was dead. So we were upset of course because it had been our egg that had hatched. So we held a funeral at the dumpster in the back of our school to the song "Human" by Christina Perri.

We miss Oprah and we regret not having had this information beforehand. We were young and dumb. We miss our Oprah and I wish we had one more chance with her. After all the hardships she had been our only survivor. She was the one who made it but she died because of our irresponsibility.

Farewell, Oprah.