Friday, August 31, 2012

Chicken Littles

We have had the worst luck with chicks lately.  Our current batch of hens we got two years ago as chicks.  The chicks were raised in our garage initially requiring a heat lamp.  Brooding chicks is not hard but very filthy work.  The chicks fouled (pun intended) their water and food supply just as quickly as their supply was replenished.

Don't count your chickens before they hatch.
The chicks grew fast.  The rapid growth of the chicks led to overcrowding and more filth which prompted many weekends working in the cold of January to build the coop.  Our exuberance and anticipation of fresh farm eggs outpaced our planning for and construction of proper chicken quarters.  Once the chicken mansion was completed, the juvenile birds were moved in and thereafter the birds required very little.  We slaughtered all of the cockerels save one who we kept with the idea of breeding our own birds.

After the messy experience of raising the chicks by hand, we believed that it would be best if we let mother nature handle the details.  This spring two hens went broody.  A broody hen remains on the nest and rarely leaves the clutch of eggs behind.  We left sixteen eggs in a nest.  Two hens sat together keeping the eggs warm while kibbitzing about the latest gossip.  The hens soon became infested with mites due to their refusal to leave the eggs and take dust baths. 

Chicken mites are incredibly prolific and will literally suck the life out of your flock.  The mites will bite humans too as our son learned.  Aside from constant coop cleaning, we found diatomaceous earth to be the best remedy.  For much of the wet spring and early summer, we suffered the mites, members of the arachnid family.  The mites finally went away when it got warm and dry. 

After twenty days, we moved the hens to a smaller enclosure because we did not want any hatched chicks to live with the other hens and the rooster for fear that they would be pecked to death.  The nursery did not have enough room for both hens in the nest so one hen sat in the box while the other did not.  The excluded hen would steal eggs from the box and sit on them but in the process she broke an egg which was a dud.  It stank just like when Templeton took the goose egg in Charlotte's Web.

The second hen was soon ousted.  She was most displeased and clucked sadly refusing to be reintegrated with the main flock.  We broke her broodiness by locking her in a dog crate alone just like they did to Andy Dufrense (Tim Robbins) in Shawshank Redemption.

Obtusely optimistic.
We waited eagerly for our eggs to hatch expecting to have at least a dozen little chicks.  After a day, we heard cheeping from the nest and spied a lone baby chick.  Success!  Over the course of the next few days, we found a fully developed dead chick with a small hole in its shell.  It was either smothered or could not manage the energy to free itself.  Beside the stillborn chick there was no other action.  Chicks usually hatch after 21 days so any time after that the hen is forced to make a Sophie's Choice of abandoning the unhatched eggs or caring for the hatched chicks. 

Balut anyone?
The remedy, or so we thought, was to hatch the remaining eggs in our incubator and hope that the hen would accept them as her own if we could surreptitiously sneak them into the nest.  After consulting the Internet, we floated the eggs in water and found what we thought were duds.  Of course we had to test a dud and when the egg was cracked there was a fully formed chick inside.  Our son shouted, "The Internet killed the chick!"  Who knew that the Internet could be loaded with false information?  Makes us wonder if we will ever get our cut from that Nigerian Prince who so desperately needed our help.

In the end we hatched another two chicks in the incubator.  They were adopted by mama hen and are doing well.  Later, we tried to hatch another clutch of eggs in the incubator.  Of the dozen, only two hatched and one died within a day.  The other chick lived for a week before it was picked off by something.  In the end, we had twenty-eight eggs of which we managed three live chicks.

Survivors.
Two weeks ago, we ordered twenty-six chicks from a farm in Pennsylvania dutch country.  We were looking to raise some meat birds in our pasture since we did not get lambs this year.  The breed of chicken were known as "Freedom Rangers" which supposedly were better at foraging than their hyper-inbreed Rock Cross Cornish birds.  There are stories of Cornish Crosses dying from heat and dehydration because they could not figure out to move into the shade where water was awaiting them.  The Cornish Crosses also grow so fast that they can develop leg problems.  Apparently, the legs cannot keep pace with their gigantic breasts. 

The Post Office called early this morning to tell us that our chicks had arrived.  Our son insisted on going into town to get the chicks.  When he opened the box, all but two of the chicks were dead.  Nothing cuter than a box full of dead fluffy chicks.  The farm in Pennsylvania was nice enough to refund us the entire amount.

The sky has fallen.
Final tally is twenty-eight eggs unhatched or prematurely dashed eggs, twenty-six hatched but dead chicks and five live birds.  That's some good animal husbandry.

Undeterred, we ordered forty broilers from our local farm store.  Based on our prior track record, we fully expect to be ordering our fried chicken from KFC.

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