I took off the animal skin belt and used a knife to remove all the stitches, revealing fifteen eggs inside.

I looked at the wooden counting spear; eighteen days had passed. It seemed the hen had been incubating these eggs for me for some time.

At this point, except for two eggs that hadn't cracked, all the other eggs had a small hole, through which the chicks could be seen breathing.

Some of the chicks that came out earlier have already started chirping. In any case, my family has finally gained some more members.

These chicks are still very young, and I'm not comfortable leaving them on the ground to raise. After all, this is a completely wild environment, and I don't know how many predators would be eyeing these newborn chicks.

The chirping of chicks is very likely to attract some small animals, and then the fruits of my hard work for more than ten days of hatching will become someone else's prize.

I absolutely will not allow this to happen, so I went and cut down a bamboo pole. I plan to make a birdcage first.

That way, the chicks can hang on my bedside like birds, so I can always see them right away.

Making a birdcage really gave me a headache. I've always been used to weaving things out of bamboo, but I've never actually done anything as delicate as making a birdcage before.

All I know is that a birdcage requires drilling many holes in a small bamboo strip, and then inserting rounded bamboo sticks to piece them together to form a space where the bird can be kept.

This sounds easy, but I have absolutely no idea where to begin when it comes to making it. Should I build a birdcage from top to bottom or bottom to top?

After thinking about it for a long time without any results, I decided to neither start from the top nor from the bottom. Anyway, I don't know how, so no one will laugh at me no matter what I do.

Therefore, following the principle of choosing the shorter one from two long ones and the longer one from two short ones, I chose the least likely middle option to start with.

Don't ask me why, there's no why, it's all just me making things up. Now that nobody's watching me, I'm just being willful!

I plan to make a round birdcage. This kind of cage is easier to make, and since I know nothing about woodworking, I think this method will also make the birdcage more sturdy.

However, I underestimated my ability to make these kinds of gadgets, to the point that the finished products I made later were so bad that even I had to shake my head when I saw them.

However, what needs to be done still needs to be done. After all, I can't possibly carry such a large bunch of chicks to my tree bed to sleep like a mother hen.

Without further ado, I skillfully and painfully split the bamboo in half, then divided each half into quarters, removed the bamboo nodes, and continued to cut them into even smaller strips.

I stopped when the pieces were only about a finger's width wide. I didn't have any blueprints, so I had to keep things simple and just drew a 3D model in my head.

My calculation is to make this cage into a persimmon-shaped birdcage with a diameter of 60 centimeters and a height of 20 centimeters.

I did this entirely to cut corners, because I wanted to make the cage as big as possible today, otherwise the baby pheasants wouldn't have a place to roost overnight.

I plan to first bend three bamboo strips, each about one finger wide, by heating them over a fire, and then cut a dovetail tenon at each end with a knife.

Because my skills are only so-so, the mortise and tenon joints I made are only passable. If they weren't bound with thin hemp twine, they would probably fall apart in no time.

After managing to make the three large bamboo rings, the next step was to build the load-bearing crossbeams at the bottom of the cage.

These beams are still made of bamboo. Three bamboo strips of suitable length are cut and laid out, starting from the center of the circle, with one strip laid evenly on each side.

These bamboo strips need to be longer than the actual length of the round frame, because I plan to carve two grooves on the bottom round frame to make it easier to insert the crossbeam and make the overall structure more sturdy.

I used the same method to make the crossbeams on the top, and then I used my drill to make a hole and nailed the bamboo nails in so that the frame wouldn't fall out.

As for the supporting bamboo strips at the bottom, my plan is even simpler: I will simply use a drill bit to drill a row of corresponding holes in the round frame.

Then insert the rounded bamboo strips directly into it, forming a cross with the crossbeam below.

The top cover is made in the same way, using a cross-shaped structure and staggered beams, which makes the load-bearing capacity perfectly adequate.

What I'm working on now is the cage walls for the birdcage. I plan to use rounded bamboo strips, each about 20 centimeters long, to make these.

Just as I finished drilling all the holes and was about to install them like the round bamboo strips at the bottom and top, I discovered a fatal problem.

I discovered that the things I assembled would separate. At first, the bottom part would fall off, but after I tried to put it back together a few times, neither the top nor the bottom part would accept it, and the middle part would become a separate unit.

I've never encountered this situation before, and it left me both amused and exasperated. These intangible cultural heritage items are indeed not so easy to make.

The problem of fixing the upper and lower parts became a challenge for me. It could be done by using rosin to bond them together.

However, my bamboo is raw, and it will shrink after it dries naturally, and it will still fall off due to the shrinkage.

In the end, I had to resort to the most rudimentary method to solve this problem.

I cut several sections of hemp rope and tied them together in the top, middle, and bottom three circular frames. This way, even if the bottom falls, the rope can still support it like a hanging basket.

By now, all the baby wild chickens had hatched. Perhaps due to their natural wildness, these little guys recovered much faster than domestic chickens.

In the firelight, the chicks quickly stood up. I was the first person they saw, so now they consider me their parent.

One by one, they trotted towards me quickly, chattering and flapping their fluffy wings, their little legs shuffling.

Looking at these adorable little guys, even this old man's girlish heart is melting. I really don't know whether these chicks will grow up to be beggar's chicken or soup.

I stretched out my hands, and these little wild chicks weren't afraid of me at all. They burrowed and spun around in my palms like children seeking their mother's embrace, as if asking why they couldn't find their mother's warm bottom.

After being hatched by their mother hen, chicks will instinctively gather under their belly feathers to keep warm.

The mother hen will only lead her chicks to forage for food once all the chicks have regained their strength.

My cage is almost finished, but I have to be careful when putting the chicks in, as it's a bit fragile and I can't afford to break it.