Getting ready for Chickens

We were given the fantastic opportunity to adopt some chicks hatched by the wonderful teachers at Small Friends Preschool, just up the street from Double Creek. Above are some of the beautiful chicks! (Photo by Lisa Sickler) They hatched out of eggs of all colors. You can watch some awesome time lapse photography of them hatching at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_bmSKql9cpw

We are eager for the chicks to come to the school, but first we have to prepare for their arrival. Young chicks, who aren't with a mother hen, will live in a small enclosure called a brooder. We set up a brooder in a plastic tote lined with pine shavings. You can see the food and water bottles in the picture. There is also a cardboard box, can you guess what it is for? 

An important part of raising chicks is keeping them warm enough. Young chicks have only soft down and can't keep themselves warm until they grow feathers like adult chickens. A popular way to keep chicks warm is with a big incandescent light.  (Not too long ago almost all lights created a lot of heat. New lights save energy by producing light without heat.) Chicks can get confused if it is light all the time though. They can have problems with their eyes and they can be more aggressive to each other.

A 'cold brooder' keeps the chicks warm without electricity by helping to trap their body heat. It is like when you stay warm by putting on a sweater or wrap up in a blanket. We made a cold brooder by hanging strips of fleece inside a small box. We are hoping that climbing in the box will feel like snuggling up under a mama hen to stay warm. 

We are going to use a hybrid brooder. Can you figure out what hybrid means? Think of a hybrid car that uses both a battery and gasoline. Or a hybrid fruit, for instance grapefruit is a hybrid, or mix, of pomelo and orange.  Do you have a guess at how our hybrid brooder works?  

Our plan is to use a 100 watt incandescent light during the day, and at night we will shut it off and let the chicks climb into the cold brooder box. Just to be extra sure they stay warm we put a tiny 8 watt heating pad in the box. Do you think it will work? We will have to watch the chicks to see if they seem comfortable, too cold, or too hot. 

The chicks won't live in the brooder forever. Once they have enough feathers to stay warm they will move outside into a chicken coop. T built this great coop for our flock. It has a perch for the chickens to roost on (that's where they will sleep), two nesting boxes for laying eggs and a covered area underneath. 

We have lots of wild animals in the area. Since chicken can be prey for many animals we will do our best to keep them safe. We dug a six inch hole under the chicken coop and laid down chicken wire so predators can't dig under the coop. Then we filled in the soil so the chickens can scratch up worms and roll in the dust. 

We put the coop over the chicken wire and paver foundation. The finished nesting box is sticking out in the back. Can you tell what we are still working on? It is a good thing we have a few more weeks to have the new habitat ready!

Tomorrow we will go and pick up our 10 chicks! They will be 6 days old. If you would like to see what they were doing at 2 days you can watch this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26FyvD9V1CQ