With a Chick Chick Here and a Chick Chick There...

Ee I ee I....OH!

We've had chickens for about three years now.  How we got into them is documented somewhere in this blog, as is the great chicken dusting saga. 

In all those years and all the additions, we've never gotten into purchasing baby chicks.  Instead, I would purchase chickens of laying age from a farm about 40 minutes away that raises and sells layer hens.

We've had some transition in our chickens.  Through general chicken population loss, or that clever fox that somehow managed to attack three in broad daylight, we basically have TWO of the many chickens we started out with.  Greta and O'Brien are our two laying hens that remain.  We lost our lovely Delaware rooster Screech, as the winter came to an end, to an illness.  Despite doctoring and mentor advice, he did not make it through.  Greta and O'Brien were lost without him and for days would not even come out of the inner coop area.  Screech had been with us a bit over two years, and he was extremely friendly and did a fine job as a rooster.

When I made the announcement on Facebook that we lost Screech, a friend wrote me that she had a rooster for me, and that's how we acquired Eugene.  He is a beautiful Rhode Island Red rooster that was only 7 months old when we took him in.  He has quickly found his place leading his harem of two and is the best hawk spotter I have ever seen.

Left to right:  Greta, O'Brien, and Eugene

We live among the red-tailed hawks who patrol our skies.  Some have buzzed us so low our dogs can leap into the air and just about grab one.  We also have raccoons, skunks, possum, and other chicken predators in our woods.  That probably explains why we built the Fort Knox of chicken dwellings last summer.  We like our chickens to free range, but now we only let them out when we are going to be working on the farm for great lengths of time and/or our horses are turned out.  The horses seem to keep predators away and chickens tend to stick to the horses fields and immediate barn/coop areas.

Every chicken loss was a great one here.  I was the one to find the fox attack.  After an extensive CSI crime scene investigation, internet research, and talking to other chicken owners, "FOX" was clearly the culprit.  We do also have coyotes, but they live off many rabbits and squirrels in our area, and rarely come close enough to our farm.  After a bit over two years with no attacks on our chickens, we felt that all was well in our poultry coop design and we were impervious.  Armies have probably fallen because of this kind of thinking.

The chickens even survived my mother staring at them longingly and telling me which ones would "make good soup."  (My mother's family raised chickens and ducks and during the depression the foul they raised were their primary food source.)  I keep telling her we don't eat anything we name.

The chicken "bunker."  If anything gets into this, they deserve to.
 

So in all this time we have not gotten into baby chicks.  We take the eggs from our brooder.  Even though Greta has a tendency to become broody at least twice a year, we manage to get her over that by either physically removing her from the nest or bribing her with treats.  It's amazing what a bag of roasted sunflower seeds will do when shaken vigorously.  Greta never misses that snack.

This year I was at our local feed store buying fly spray when I heard the peeping noises coming from the "chick" room.  Then, I did what I shouldn't have done.  I went in.  There were loads of chicks available, also ducklings.  And in that moment of cuteness and "how-hard-can-this-be-ness" I caved and bought six baby chicks.  Four Americanas and two Barred Rock Bantams.

When I got home I broke the news to my husband who is well versed in having animals thrown at him quite unexpectedly.  We totally cleaned the enclosed coop area and put the one week old chicks inside.  Unfortunately, this was during a period of time when we were going through unseasonable spring weather and our nights were dropping down to 42 degrees.  Even with our heat lamp, the internal coop temp was only coming up to 70 degrees.  Chicks need 80 degrees and above.  On that first night we decided to ready a large Rubbermaid trunk and bring them into our downstairs half bath, which is very warm as an interior room in our house.  It also made it easier on me for the vast amount of cleaning that needs to occur with baby chicks, since they insist on pooping in their feeder, in their waterer, and all over their bedding about 90x per chick per day.  This also gave me a chance to handle them at least once per day so they got used to me, and got used to the idea of my hand offering treats.


The chicks in their internal coop on the first day home.

I also got to observe baby chick behavior, which can be very humorous.

Within one week they were starting to grow and more feathers were coming in.  They began to learn about treats, which I gave them in limited quantities, especially meal worms, which they love.  It's so much fun to watch them grab a meal worm and run so that none of the other chicks will get it.

Within two weeks they were flying everywhere within their Rubbermaid trunk (and sometimes NOT within their Rubbermaid trunk), and often I would find one or two of them sitting on the edge of it.  We made them a perch within the trunk which they used instead of the edge.  Still, once in a while, I'd hear a volley of peeping like someone was being massacred, and go in to find one had flown completely out of the trunk and could not figure out how to fly back in.

This past week we moved them permanently to the inner coop with their heat lamp and reclaimed our bathroom.  It was starting to look like a frat house party site, so I'm glad to be able to have it back to normal.  The chicks have so many more feathers, are so much bigger and have so much more room to fly.  There is a great perch inside the coop, which we lowered for them until they are bigger, and their heat lamp keeps the temps at about 75 degrees at all times.  They seem quite happy, and have now begun to play chicken games with each other.  Queen of the perch seems to be a favorite.  I laughed the other day as the smallest of the bunch made herself as big as chickenly possible when you are "chicken little" and ran full throttle flapping her wings at her buddies to be sure they understood just how menacing she can be.

Our other three larger birds are living temporarily in the original coop we had within our barn (a converted hay room--we have two hay rooms, so it was easy to reconvert this one back to a chicken abode).  Once the chicks are large enough we will start segregating them from the larger birds so that they can see each other but not interact.  Eventually all things will work out.  We are keeping our fingers crossed that all birds stay with us for a long time.  I'll keep you posted, and hope to get updated photos soon.

Aaaarrrrrooooooo!