I made a mistake last week. I said that the baby chicks that we were going to get in the mail were packed in a box with three days worth of food. They are not. Baby chickens don’t even eat for the first few days after they’ve hatched!
They absorb the last of the egg yolk right before they hatch, and that supplies them with all their nutritional needs for the first 48 hours of their lives. I had thought that the yolk turned into the chicken, but I was so wrong. In a fertilized egg, the chicken starts out as a microscopic cell that uses the yolk for food as it grows, and the albumin (which is the name for the egg-white) as a protective membrane.
Our baby chickens arrived Wednesday morning in a little cardboard box with a gazillion holes in the top and sides. The Post Office called us just as we came in from feeding the goats. Everyone at the Post Office was excited. They were cheeping their little hearts out. The baby chicks, not the postal carriers.
Not a single one of our chickens died during their long postal adventure. They were born in Iowa. In their short lives they've already traveled nearly a thousand miles.
You know, hardly anyone will deliver baby chicks. The reason we bought so many (we got 26 of them) was that it’s the only way to get free shipping - ordering that many. Otherwise the shipping costs over fifty dollars.
UPS won’t deliver baby chicks, FedEx won’t deliver baby chicks. Only the U.S. Postal Service will. Do you remember their unofficial motto?
"Neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night stays these courageous couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds."
Those words were written by the Greek historian Herodotus about the Persian mounted postal couriers. They had a particularly faithful delivery system around 500 BCE. They were famous for their on-time deliveries during the Greek-Persian wars. I'm not sure they ever had to deliver baby chicks, though. Probably all they had to carry was military secrets.
When we got our chicks home from the Post Office, we had to dip each of their beaks in water, and then set them gently into their pen in Kat’s room. You don’t have to do that if they’ve hatched at home, but if they've just spent the first 48 hours of their lives in the mail, they’re a little bit dehydrated. You need to get them excited about drinking water as soon as possible.
They came with a little packet of “grow gel” that we mixed with water and spread on top of some of their feed. That’s the green stuff in the shallow bowl in this photo:
We had to get grit for our babies, which we mix in with their special baby chicken chow. I had to share the photo of the grit jar because that label makes me laugh. I feel as if Jan and I are chicks with grit. Ha!
We have special baby chicken vitamins that we mix in their water. Jan bought quail waterers to put in their pen because they can drown in an adult chicken waterer. (Who knew people were raising quail?)
Amazingly, when we set the babies down in their pen, they immediately started running around, eating, drinking, and pooping. We’re supposed to keep checking their butts to make sure they don’t get plugged with dried poop sticking to them. We actually had to pick up a chicken and search for the appropriate place to look. For the obstructing poop. It took some time and a very patient chicken to figure it out. I mean, the exact location is not something you think about every day. We have to check their butts every day for the first week. But, really, they seem to be thriving.
We got all their needs met, then stood around watching them run underneath their heater and run back out. They are making a very different sound than they were making at the Post Office. When we picked them up and got into the car, they were really deafening. Now they are making peeps that are delicate and sweet. Anyway, we watched them for awhile, and then Jan said, “I think they need a roost!”
So, I ran to the hardware store, bought a two-by-four, a dowel, some conduit clamps and some wood screws, came home, and built them a little roost! This morning, I was a farmer!
Seriously, I was so proud. Because I think that’s what it means to be a farmer. Well, that’s a part of it. When you need something, you just figure out how to build it and get it done. I was proud that I’d visualized a way to get what we needed, and made it a reality for under $18.00.
So, for the next couple of weeks, we have to take the chickens out of their pen every morning - putting them into this bucket - and replace the puppy pads on the floor of their pen:
Little Bela is as enthusiastic about the chickens as we are. She's found the perfect place to observe them through a crack in the cardboard. She sits there, watching them, for hours. Me, too!
