Let's Talk Chicks!

The sun rises before we wake, the rooster is crowing, and the snow is almost gone! You know what that means: Spring! It’s super exciting for us, and not only because it means we can spend our days getting muddy and not wear ten layers of clothing, but because it means baby everything! Baby plants, baby goats, and of course baby chickens! While I could talk about all these joys, I’m limiting today’s post to chicks.

We have been raising chicks for about four years, so in no way do I consider myself a professional, or even overly knowledgeable. However, I do seem to be getting a lot of questions about chicks and chickens from friends, and I thought maybe more of you have questions, or general interest and I can tell you what I know!

Just a nice day in the sun while Brandon
modifies their brooder to be outside!

Our chicks arrived by mail seven weeks ago. Yes, mail! People generally seem surprised to find out you can order chicks online and have them delivered. Not only can you do this, but it is very efficient both monetarily and time wise. We ordered our chicks this year from McMurray Hatchery a month or so ahead of time and were able to choose a hatch date that lined up to when Brandon was home from work. The chicks arrived to our local mail carriers in the morning, and I was able to hop out of bed and grab them as fast as I could drive to the post office.  We have received chicks from other hatcheries in the past, and while they were good chicks, we have found that we like McMurray’s, and their chicks are pretty hardy. Some of our favorite chickens have come from their "All Heavies" bird special and we ended up just keeping some of the birds over winter as layers.

[Murray McMurray’s All Heavies bird order is a giant order of just dual purpose roosters! Guess what, they didn’t all turn out to be roosters!]

They really don't need much, or want
much, from us

That being said, we have also bought birds locally, and they were fabulous. Our first coop was a bunch of chicks hatched out by a friend. We’ve bought some off the local flock pages, and one year we ordered from an awesome breeder in Chugiak called Chugiak Chicks. The reason we chose not to do that this year was due to the amount we wanted and the breeds we were hoping to get. Brandon and I wanted a large amount of dual purpose birds, and local breeders, while well worth the cost, were just not in our budget.

A concern that a lot of people have about flying chicks is their health. How can baby chicks possibly live in a box and be flown around? Well, its actually pretty interesting. Chicks, when hatched under their mother, sometimes do not leave her warm nest for days while their mother awaits all of her chicks to hatch. They are able to survive for up to 72 hours on just the nutrients from what is in their eggs. With this knowledge, hatcheries try to set eggs all at the same time, (instead of over the span of time like hens do), and have a day where the majority will hatch. On the day they are hatched they packaged them in a large group into a box with straw and ship them on overnight or two-day mail. (Chicks are not sent with any food or water because once they start to eat and drink normally they have to constantly be eating and drinking in order to survive.) We receive the tracking number and are able to watch as the chicks take their first adventure to our farm.

These kids love Chick season as
much as we do!

Upon arrival this year, a couple weren’t looking too good and eventually died. It's sad to see chicks die, but in reality, even the chicks born under our broody hens occasionally die. I don’t typically attribute their deaths to travel, rather to their hardy-ness. With the risk of sounding heartless; if they aren’t hardy to begin with they will not do well on our farm. We do our best to care for the health and well being of all our animals whether they be meat or egg or milk producing, but overall in our climate we expect animals to have a certain level of strength in order to survive.

They look dead, right? They are in fact,
just napping.

This year, our shipment arrived with eighty-four chicks. Sixteen each of Salmon Faverolles, White Orpingtons, Americaunas, Light Brahmas, and Silver Laced Wyandottes, and the hatchery threw in four extras.  Why so many, you may ask and I’ll tell you: eggs and meat. All of the breeds we chose this year are dual purpose breeds, meaning they can either be meat birds, or egg layers. Yes, we could just buy meat producing birds and just egg laying birds, but that would not help us reach our goal. Eventually we would like to achieve a point where we are no longer buying birds from other places. We want to have a self sustaining flock. We want birds that produce eggs and hatch chicks to replace them, and birds for eating. Thus we decided to go wild and buy everything we need for this summer, winter, and what can help support our flock for the next year as well.  We will be able to watch the different breeds grow and develop and decide what breeds we want to continue with to help us accomplish our self sustaining flock long term.

This was a wonderful night of cleaning
poop off of chick bottoms!

There is one other reason we don’t buy the fast growing meat specific breeds, that being: We kind of hate them. The Cornish crosses are everything we hate about chickens that have been bred for only one purpose. All they do is eat, sit, and die. That is their entire purpose. The chicken industry in some ways can also be very gruesome. Large meat processors don’t want small meat chickens, and giant egg producers don’t want chickens that don’t produce eggs. So male egg laying breeds, and female meat breeds often will be disposed of very soon after hatching. Its not pretty, or something I plan to talk much about, however we feel it is important to note in our decision to choose dual purpose birds that it is not a practice we support. Every bird we have has a purpose and will be treated humanely in both life and death.

Another point I want to mention is feeding the chicks. Our chicks are always started on non medicated chick starter and are offered it up until they reach egg laying maturity. It is a full diet for them, but after a few weeks we start adding more to their diet such as greens, seeds, and food scraps. All of the chicks we chose this year and in the past have a lot of natural instinct. With meat specific breeds you’ll find their natural instinct to be almost non existent.  This is not something I am eager to breed or even have on our farm. The chicks with natural instinct will be found even in their first week of life scratching the brooder floor looking for bugs and food. We had a hen last summer who hid twenty eggs in a goat house, hatched out six, and taught them to eat and live within the goat pen without any of our intervention. I love chicks and chickens like this, the less they need me, the better. Not to mention, when a chicken is free range scratching and eating table scraps, and anything they can find, the feed costs go down. I can tell you my chickens would much rather be snacking on old stale bread, bugs, and wilted cabbage leaves than the pellet feed we provide.

When we first started with chicks we bought book upon book and asked advice from anyone we could find. We worried about chickens that we probably shouldn’t have, and asked questions that now seem ridiculous. If you are looking into getting chicks I 100% recommend doing the same. A couple resources we have liked and used: The Small Scale Poultry Flock, by Harvey Ussery, our local Facebook flock groups, the backyard chickens forums, and Story’s Guide to Raising Poultry. If you want to ask us questions, please feel free, we love to talk about animals. (Obviously that’s why I wrote this post- because I haven’t been able to spew chicken facts on my friends and strangers as much this season with all this social distancing we’ve been doing.)

I hope everyone is enjoying spring as much as we are! Stay posted for goat kidding announcements and lots of gardening photos on Instagram @wildwillowfarm.ak. And again, if you have any questions feel free to ask!