Monthly Archives: February 2012

We have a rooster!

A lot has happened in the past week. The girls have grown considerably. Their wing feathers are coming in, and their tail buds are sprouting feathers too. Believe it or not, I think they’ve gotten slightly quieter and significantly less smelly.

We made a trip to a chicken vet last Friday, who prescribed a round of twice daily antibiotics for two weeks to treat the mysterious sneezing, though she acknowledged that it could well be a virus that’s ailing them. It’s hard to tell if the medicine has done the original sneezer, now named Olive, any good. What I can say with certainty is that the other chicks have begun sneezing too, though much less frequently than Olive.

Unfortunately, administering the antibiotics is highly stressful for everyone involved. The chicks hate getting a syringe of peanut-butter-flavored goo down the gullet and have become adept at shaking their little heads back and forth and clamping their beaks shut.  While I hold the bird in one hand and steady its head with the other, Kelly opens the beak and sticks the tip of the syringe past the point where the bird could aspirate the medicine. Yikes! The whole ordeal involves a lot of frantic chirping. When they know they’ve been had, the babies close their eyes, and tremble, and break our hearts.

Real sun and real dirt

The chicks survey the outside world for the first time.

This past weekend, we took the babies outside for the first time and began supplementing their medicated chick feed with fresh greens and bugs. This was at the vet’s suggestion. She informed us that our avian children are at the age where their mother would be showing them the world and introducing them to new foods.

Late Saturday night, Kelly and I went on a garden expedition in search of grubs and greens. We were unable to find the cabbage moth larvae we had hoped to offer them, but we did score several sow bugs, a slug, weedy grass with roots and dirt attached (they adored the dirt!), and a mix of lettuce, spinach, and aphid infested kale.

The babies were uncertain at first what to make of this bounty, but within a few minutes Luma’s curiosity got the best of her. She may be a week younger than the others, but our little Barred Rock has become a fully integrated member of the group. As it turns out, she may also be the most competitive, running frantically around the brooder box to keep her prize bugs away from the other chicks, and snatching choice tidbits out of her sisters’ beaks.

On Sunday, we set up a little round of chicken wire outside in the dirt and leaf litter and let the chicks run around in the sun. Once again, they didn’t know what to do for the first minute or so. They stood in a huddle and blinked up at the sky. It wasn’t long, though, before they started pecking, and scratching, and tearing around after each other.

I’m learning a lot about chicken psychology. For instance, everything is more interesting if another bird already found it. The biggest, fattest, most succulent grub can be sitting three inches away, but the chicks will pass it by repeatedly, until one of them picks it up. From that moment on, they are all hell-bent on stealing it for themselves.

The feeding huddle.

Planning the chicken coop

Even with Kelly’s super deluxe, reinforced cardboard box, I’m worried that the chicks may soon outgrow their space. With their new wing feathers, they are making running-hopping-test-flights down the length of the box. They have figured out how to get up on the perch that Kelly installed for them and Luma, in particular, seems to enjoy sitting on it and preening.

I see a coop-making Saturday in our very near future.

Luma, the baby Barred Rock.

The Barred Rock chick, Luma, joined the flock last Friday night. Though she initially suffered the consequences of being a week younger than the others and a newbie to the group, everyone seems to have adjusted well to her presence. They no longer go out of their way to feed around her feet, or peck her senselessly while she tries to sleep. In fact, I’ve seen her get in a few good pecks at other chicks in the past days.

A pecking order emerges

Ironically, the chick nicknamed Mellow for its sleepiness the night we brought her home seems to have landed the title of top chick. She walks over the backs of her sleeping sisters occasionally to remind them all that she can do what she pleases, and she is fond of taking running leaps to see if she can scale the feeding jar. Kelly spent long hours on Sunday afternoon making a bigger box for the chicks  to live in, so Mellow and the others now have all the room they want to run and test their wings.

Kelly puts the finishing touches on the new brooder.

The sneezing chick

From the night we brought them home, Kelly and I noticed that Spotty (she still hasn’t graduated to her real name) sneezed occasionally. Since she seemed healthy and energetic other than the odd sneeze, we decided to wait and watch. Unfortunately, the sneezing has increased noticeably yesterday and today, and I called some chicken-loving friends this morning to get their input. They directed me to their favorite chicken vet, who was kind enough to talk with me briefly over the phone.

Apparently chicks, like humans, can sneeze for any number of reasons. Bacterial and viral infections are both possibilities, but as long as Spotty remains active and bright-eyed, without any discharge from her eyes or nares (bird nostrils), the vet said we can continue to play the waiting game, and see if she improves.

It's good to have friends to lean on at nap time.

In a fit of love-stricken spontaneity last Tuesday, Kelly and I drove half an hour to the nearest real farm supply store and brought home three week-old Barred Leghorn chicks. They cried in their box the whole way home and promptly fell asleep as soon as we got them set up under a heat lamp.

They did a lot of sleeping and pooping that night, and we hovered over their cardboard box, alternately cooing at them, guffawing at their baby antics, and fretting over their wellbeing. Let me just say now that neither of us really knows what we’re doing, and we’re both terrible worrywarts.

As it turned out, there was reason to be concerned. One of our new tinies (she currently answers to spotty, or spot-on-the-head) had a gob of dried poop partially blocking her vent. Fortunately, her concerned adoptive mothers did a little hasty Internet research and discovered that this is a potentially fatal condition in chicks known as pasting up, and that it is imperative to remove the offending gob regardless of how strongly the chick objects.

And so it was that Kelly and I found ourselves force-bathing an indignant ball of fluff at 11:45 PM on Valentine’s Day. As I suspected it would be, our chicken learning curve has already been a steep one. After dunking Spotty’s rear end in a bowl of warm water and gently picking off the poop, we blow dried her and returned her to her sisters.

Five chicken lessons from the first week

Since that first night, we haven’t had any emergencies, but we’ve learned a thing or two about our mini-chickens.

1. Chicks are noisy. The chick box is in the spare room, and though we keep the door closed, it’s easy to hear their near-incessant peeping through the night.

2. Chicks fall asleep the way people do on buses and in movie theaters. One of our greatest delights has been watching the chicks fall asleep. They can’t help themselves. A chick will suddenly stop pecking for food, and its little head will begin drifting downward, until the tip of its beak touches the ground. Then it will sink lower, and its cheek will press into the floor, and its little eyelids will flicker. And then, suddenly, it will jerk itself awake, shake off its nap, ruffle its feathers, and head off for a snack.

3. Chicks smell terrible. I think of baby animals as all having the same sweet, new-to-the-earth smell. Not so with chickens. Sometimes, when I touch my nose to one of their soft little heads, I almost think I catch a whiff of good baby smell, but then the overtones of nasty chicken poop drown it out. I’m here to say that chicken poop is one of the most offensive smelling forms of excrement I’ve ever come across. I wish I could believe I’ll get over my aversion to it in the coming seven weeks of indoor chickens, but I suspect it will only get worse as they grow and produce more of it.

4. Chicks grow fast.  Really fast. By Wednesday afternoon, Kelly and I could both tell that the chicks had already grown. In the past few days their wings have developed considerably, and they now flap a few times as they run to get away from us in the box. They eat all the time, and it certainly seems to be paying off.

5. Chicks can make other pets (like cats) very jealous. Pudy seems to be torn between wanting to hunt them, feeling unnerved by them, and feeling abandoned and rejected by the humans in the house. Despite our best efforts to assure her that we still love her, and to introduce her (from a safe distance) to the chicks, she continues to slink around the house and claw the back of the sofa when we are in the chicken room.

A baby sister for the girls

This evening we’re headed back to the feed store to pick up the flock’s final member: a three-day-old Barred Rock chick. We hadn’t originally planned to get Leghorns; in fact Leghorns have a reputation for nasty temperaments (and phenomenal egg production!). Barred Rock birds are said to be very mild-mannered and friendly, as well as good egg-layers, so we figure she’ll be an excellent addition to the flock.