more sleeping

The chicks are now very comfortable with me reaching in the brooder, and welcome the camera as well.  This provides some comical shots.  Here is Stevie, 2 weeks old, not yet figured out how to roost, but sleeping, nonetheless:

 

 

 Note the activity beside and below her.  She sleeps through anything.

Ruthie, on the other hand, has the roost figured out:

 If you are new to this blog, I've written about Ruthie before.  She is a white crested black or blue Polish chick, and may look like this when she grows up:

By the way, I borrowed this photo from Livingscape Nursery but hope to have my own adult shot one day.  
Ruthie is tough, resilient, and happens to be the smallest chick in the flock.  This morning a Rhode Island Red (I need my daughter to tell you which one) had something in her mouth, and was running, squawking - why they squawk is a mystery, since a quiet chick can feast in peace - and Ruthie was the only chick brave enough to chase the other bird.  Let's hope Ruthie doesn't turn into Rutherford the rooster!


Anne at Echo Mountain View Road chickens

Names

T.S. Eliot tells us that the naming of cats is a "difficult matter, it isn't just one of your holiday games." Well, with 22 chicks, we had some lively discussions about the naming of hens.  Our daughter wanted to name them after book characters and Greek goddesses.  And the Polish chicks were given honorary names.  Hence the following:

Polish chicks
Ruthie
Amy
Stevie
Annabeth
Rosie


Barred Plymouth Rocks - after Harry Potter
Harrietta
Rhonda
Jenny
Tonks
Belatrix 
Narcissa
If the 6th chick turns out to be a rooster, we will alter his name


Rhode Island Reds - named after Pretty Little Liars
Aria
Hannah
Alison
Emily
Spenser
And we were given an extra chick that may be a rooster - Toby

Americaunas, named after Greek Goddesses
Hera
Artemis
Iris
Demeter
Lou - we know Lou is not a Greek Goddess, but she was named when we thought she might be a polish chick.  She is lovely, all white, with angelic wings.
 




Anne at Echo Mountain View Road chickens

Chicken lingo

I continue to be surprised at how much chicken language has made it into our everyday lexicon.  Some examples:
Hackles
Cooped up
Waddle
Chick
Mother hen
chicken out

I am sure there are plenty more.
 

Anne at Echo Mountain View Road chickens

Sleeping chicks

Reading the forum about transitioning chicks to a coop from a brooder is like reading a forum discussion on getting children to sleep.  There is the Farber method where you just put the chicks in the coop, turn off the light, let them squabble a bit, and then they settle down.  For some of us, though, we anthropomorphize our babies and need to feel as though they feel safe.  I saw all sorts of suggestions, from night lights, timers, solar powered lights that dim.  

And who knew that a chicken can fall off the roost?  Nightmare for me, indeed!

Baby Chicks doze off where ever they stand.  Then settle down to sleeping on the ground


 

Anne at Echo Mountain View Road chickens

poop

Chick(en)s poop a lot.  It is said they peep, poop, sleep, poop, eat, poop - you get the picture.

The only other time I ever found this topic, poop, interesting, was when my daughter was a baby.  Anyone changing diapers gets intimate with poop.  We had a diaper service as we are not only environmentally conscious, but I had heard that babies in cloth tend to use the toilet earlier.  And the diaper service said, drop the diaper in the bucket poop and all.  So by now you are saying, what about the chickens?  Turns out, you can tell a lot about the chick(en) by looking at her poop.  This can be one of two things, 1. relief because you discover chick(en)s have two different kinds of poop - no alarm when you see what looks like mustard, and 2. alarming because you find yourself examing their poop much like I did with my infant daughter.  And there is even a website with poop examples:

Poop chart

And now the real reason for this post - we switched brooders.  Our chicks had been in a large galvanized tub

 This was not bad, but we knew the time was right around the corner when the peeps would have to be moved.  They flap and run, and one hopped up on the water dispenser.  Not a safe situation.  However, in this tub, we used paper towels on the bottom to catch the poop.  Using paper towels, one can clearly see the poop in all its glory - all kinds.  And if you wait long enough, minutes, I mean, you can see each chick poop and tell whether or not they are heathy outputs.
 But we moved them last night into a two room mansion:

 This one is made from an extra large dog carrier, bottom and top halves linked and clamped together.  As you can see, I've added pine shavings instead of paper towel.  The good news is that it smells better and the chicks love it.  The bad news: it is impossible to follow the poop.  They scratch the pine all the while pooping, pecking, and eating so that I will never know who pooped what.  Being a mother to 22 children is not an easy task.  

One final word about poop: sometimes the little gals (or guys) need to have their bottoms cleaned.  I'm told it's called pasting.  Good name for it as the poop settles right into the birds small fuzz and hardens like paste.  I hold the little peep up so he/she can see her/himself in the mirror - very distracting as they love to look at themselves.  Mission accomplished, back in the brooder to poop some more.
 
Anne at Echo Mountain View Road chickens

chick antics

I had heard that chicks were fun to watch, but I had no idea.  They remind me of babies - constantly doing something funny, and always amazed at themselves and others.  Today we tried to give them yogurt, highly recommended on a chicken forum.  (I am now reading a chicken forum religiously - like I read adoption forums when we were going through the adoption of our daughter - and posted a query at the slightest indication of a perceived problem - and my behavior has not changed).

We put the yogurt in a half an egg carton - seemed fitting that they should get use to the shape, and placed it in the brooder.  Some came up to it and stared at the foreign object, some squawked and headed to the opposite side of the brooder.  The Barred Plymouth Rocks, or BPR, as they are called on the forums, were the first to investigate.  But no pecks.  My daughter put some on her finger, and a chick pecked at it, but shook her beak and backed off.  We sprinkled some chicken feed (gotta love that expression - especially organic chicken feed, which is no chicken feed!)  But still they did not bite.  They walked around the carton lid, some pecked at the carton but not the yogurt.  

The chick toward the back of the picture is Ruthie.  She remained intrigued by the container but never tried the yogurt.

Ruthie is one of our favorites.  She may be a non bearded white crested black polish chick.  But don't put that in a search engine - god knows what you'll get.  
You can tell by Ruthie's look that she is very curious.  She usually greets my hand when I stick it in the brooder to remove the feeder or water.  

  And then there are the sleeping chicks.  Anyone who has owned chicks will tell you that a sleeping chick resembles a dead chick.  I have to wait a minute to see the breast heaving in order to assure myself that the chick is really alive.  And here I will admit that my daughter was almost 8 before I stopped peaking in her room after she was asleep to make sure she was still breathing.  


Here is the sleeping chick - the pictures are hard to see because they are taken while a red heat lamp shines down on them. They usually sleep in the warm corner.  Sometimes they are power naps, other times, they splay their wings and legs out looking like road kill.

 She is up because I made a noise when I lifted the screen, then seconds later, down again.

And speaking of the screen, the reason we have the top covered is to keep the Barred Plymouth Rocks from hopping out! In just a short week of their lives, they want to explore outside the brooder!  They can almost reach the top, and I have visions of them soaring out and onto the floor.  I am not ready for their freedom yet.

Anne at Echo Mountain View Road chickens

the coop

The coop de gras!  Building began on Wednesday, March 11, the day they shipped the chicks.  Since it will be awhile before they can be released into the coop, we should get in finished in plenty of time.  We are building one similar to my dream coop.

"Regard it as just as desirable to build a chicken house as to build a cathedral." Frank Lloyd Wright

 Well, Frank knew  of what he spoke, for sure.  This chicken coop is no ordinary coop.  I used the design from a coop I found on a chicken forum. Let me digress.  A few years ago, I learned about chicken tractors.  You build a small pyramid like structure and attach a short run for the chickens.  Then you move the tractor around your property so that the poop fertilizes your yard and the chickens don't destroy one place.  Chickens scratching can denude the ground.  However, this is done with a handful of chickens - three, maybe four at the most.  When I was confronted with the choices of chickens, how could I stop?  And the place I ordered from had a minimum order of 15!  You can't just have three breeds, so that makes 20, and then they throw in a couple more and you find yourself with a very large flock!

So, tractor idea out the window - and coop building commences.

You can see the beginnings here - footings set, two guys hard at work.  The lengths we go for the girls.


The windows for the coop are from freecycle.  I posted a request for vinyl flooring, but no luck = I may have to plead with a flooring company to give me some odd pieces.  Nothing but the best for the chicks!


A word about the chicks - they are trying to fly.  They sprouted wings overnight, it seems.  These little feathery wings pop out from behind the chick fuzz.  Sometimes they run and jump, regardless of what or who might be in their way.  


Also, if you anthropomorphize the chicks, an easy task, it is easy to imagine the conversations they have.  They stop and look at each other quizzically, as though running into an old high school friend whose name they can't remember.  One tilts her head, the other tilts back, they nod, then walk on.   Sometimes four or five of them will face the wall of the tub, heads still, motionless, as though expecting the door of an elevator to open.

 


Anne at Echo Mountain View Road chickens

The chicks arrive!

We got the email on Wednesday, May 11, just as they promised, and this morning at 6:45, Debbie at the post office called.  "Your chicks are here!"

Our post office is the kind where you know everyone who works there.  They know everything about you because they deliver your mail.  They know which bank statements we receive, which credit cards we have, and they handle a million pieces of junk mail for me alone.  I admire them.  But our post office is so small that they pay attention to your mail.  When we got there, about 7:05, we rang the bell.  I could hear the peeps through the door.  Debbie answered and handed us the small box - how could that box handle 20 (later we found out -22) chicks?  She said, "I peeked inside, all different kinds!"  And sure enough, one of them, Ruthie, had a white top hat!  So pics are a must:

Already I am in love with these girls. Here are some more pictures:

 

 This is an Americauna or Easter Egg chicken.  She has tufts coming out the side of her cheeks.  She'll lay green or blue eggs.  

We also have this odd chick - not sure what kind she is.  I will post pictures of the others tomorrow.  Already it's been a stressful day for them, and me.  Earlier, two of the rhode island reds were aggressive, so we increased the size of their brooder and now they are happy, thank goodness.  It's a good thing we read about how chicks nap - they look dead!  Or they look terribly sick - head bowed, wings slightly ajar, until someone comes along and bumps them, either by accident or intentionally, and UP they pop, wide awake.  Chicks are not for the faint of heart.

We also had a couple that were self pecking.  It was as though they could not stop grooming themselves.  And once the chicks show a little red skin, well, everyone else thinks it's ok to peck too.  I picked them up one at a time and rinsed off their little furry breasts.  Apparently that did the trick.



Anne at Echo Mountain View Road chickens

The road to chickens

When we first decided to order chickens, or chicks, I should say, I had two obsessions: 1. building the coop; 2. reading everything there is about raising chickens from chicks.  

Since we ordered 20 chickens - let me digress a minute.  The reason we ordered 20 is because the total minimum order for shipping is 15, and the minimum per breed is 5.  How do you choose among the hundreds of different breeds available?  Three months ago I thought there was 1 breed of chicken!  When faced with all the choices, I could not narrow it down to more than four breeds.  And who can resist a top hat special?

 

Coop design I found online 

When building a coop, it's important to know how many chickens you need to house.  It is recommended 2-4 ft2 per chicken.  Because we want happy chickens, we are shooting for the higher number, giving our animals plenty of legroom.  That, if my math is correct, means 80 ft2.  Our final coop design will be about 70 ft2, because of a roofing issue, but more on that later.  Suffice it to say, between our friend who is helping us build, our family dynamics, I am relenting on the extra 10 ft2 to save my marriage.  The chickens ultimately will be happier if there are two of us feeding them.

The picture above is what I want my coop to look like.  However, I got the windows free on freecycle and they are a bit larger than those pictured above, so my coop will have different dimensions.  And I want a full size door.  The final coop should be an interesting variation on the above.  I picked this design because it reminded me of a West Indian house.  We lived on the island of St Croix for many years, and the hip roof was always one of my favorite features of the architecture in the Caribbean.

At this point in time, we have marked out the spot for the coop.  Building should commence in a week.

I combed the bookstores, both online and brick/mortar, for books on chickens. The first book was a borrowed one.   

Link to book
I enjoyed the book, and found it helpful, but it wasn't mine.  I love books.  The first purchased book was one that another friend recommended.  Once you start talking about chickens, people that want to own them get every excited for you.  This book is

 Link to book

Barbara Kilarski's book is informative and entertaining.  She is a bit repetitive in places, but no one reads this book cover to cover - you pick it up and concentrate on the part you need to know now.  Reading these books reminds me of when we were waiting for our daughter to be ours.  As we plodded along, painfully waiting for the adoption to be final, I read What to Expect the First Year.  I tried to follow along with the developmentally appropriate parts, but often flipped ahead, or back to get some semblance of sanity as I waited.  The six months took six years, it seemed.  And waiting for these chickens is also hard.  I am impatient.


Then I found the bible of all chicken books:

Link to book


This tome has everything you need to know about chickens and a whole lot more.  I love this book.  But in some ways, it's like owning the Physicians Desk Reference.  There is nothing worse than knowing about problems for me to see problems where they don't exist.  But the book cures my need for detail.  I can study this book every day and still not understand it all, and won't until the chicks arrive and I go through every stage first hand.  I cannot wait.

I will add, on the cover of Damerow's book are three beautiful laced wyandottes.  How did I go from not knowing anything about chickens to being able to identify the breed on the cover of a book?  I am hooked. 
 
Anne at Echo Mountain View Road chickens

The picture above came from the Misty Mountain 4-H poultry club - I have no idea where Misty Mountain is, but found the pic when I was looking for an image to put on a mother's day card to my mother.  We are expecting a shipment of chicks, our first.  The order includes what efowl calls Top Hat Specials, and among those specials are Mottled Houdan Chickens.  Since I told my mother I was naming one of the chicks after her in honor of Mother's Day, I wanted to find a picture that exemplifies motherhood.  

The other 19 expected chicks will include

the rest of the top hat specials efowl's top hat link

5 Barred Plymouth Rocks 

5 Rhode Island Reds

and 5 Americaunas

The chickens are due to ship May 11, which happens to be my friend's birthday.  So another top hat special will be named Amy.   The third will be named after my mother's chicken Rosie, a nondescript chicken that she inherited when she bought a small farmhouse in Windham, Maine back in the late 1970's.  Rosie was broody, laying an occasional non fertilized egg, and sitting on it faithfully for 21 days.

The other chickens will be named by my daughter, using the names of characters in her favorite books.  More on that later....