A woman in Qingdao, China, came home from a short holiday to discover that 70 chicks had hatched from 90 eggs she had purchased from a local store.
The eggs, which were left in the kitchen while she was away, were unintentionally incubated due to high temperatures during a heatwave. Without refrigeration, the warm environment provided the ideal conditions for fertilized eggs to hatch.
Most eggs sold in stores are unfertilized, but in this case, fertilized eggs appear to have made it into the batch. Combined with sustained heat, this resulted in a highly unusual outcome: mass hatching in a residential kitchen.
“I thought I was hallucinating,” the woman told local media after seeing dozens of chicks moving across her kitchen floor.
With no prior experience caring for chicks, the woman and her family improvised. They built temporary shelters using sweaters and fed the chicks rice porridge with syringes.
Two chicks were kept as pets by her son, while the remaining 68 were relocated to relatives in rural areas.
The incident has drawn public attention and raised questions about how fertilized eggs are handled in the commercial supply chain.
