How to Order Baby Chickens from a Poultry Hatchery

Image Gallery Chicks are shipped in cardboard boxes designed to keep them warm. VEVILA/FOTOLIA

Hatching eggs in an incubator or under a hen is an exciting project, and shopping for chicks or other baby poultry at a farm store is great fun. But you can order baby chickens to be shipped from a poultry hatchery through the mail, too. This is a great way to find some unusual breeds or varieties. It also helps with planning: If you rely on hatching eggs, you can never be quite certain how many chicks you'll get.

Right before hatching, chicks and other baby poultry absorb the last of the yolk — their food source during incubation. For most species, this last bit of yolk provides enough nutrition to sustain the baby for about three days without eating or drinking, which makes shipping chicks through the mail possible, if they arrive quickly.

You can find the breed or variety of chickens, ducks, turkeys, geese or other fowl you're looking for easily and quickly with the Mother Earth News Hatchery Finder, which searches more than 60 hatcheries from across the United States.

When preparing your order, here are some good things to keep in mind.

• Most hatcheries offer you a choice of males (cockerels), females (pullets) or "straight run," the natural mix of genders at hatching, which is roughly 50 percent to 60 percent males. Determining the sex of chicks is difficult and requires special training. Even the people who are most skilled at sexing chicks are not perfectly accurate, so if you order all pullets, expect up to 10 percent to be cockerels.
• Large commercial hatcheries sell poultry that has been bred to be raised in confinement and to produce large numbers of eggs or to grow extremely quickly for meat. But if you want especially beautiful, interesting birds that meet color and conformation standards of the American Poultry Association, order from a breeder or a hatchery that specifies "show quality."
• Chicks (not waterfowl or turkeys) can be vaccinated against Marek's disease, a viral disease that causes nerve damage, before leaving the hatchery. If you want to raise your chickens without vaccines or antibiotics, you could skip the vaccine, but check with a veterinarian to learn more about Marek's disease in your area. (Ducks and geese are almost disease-free and don't require the vaccine.)
• Many hatcheries offer debeaking service, removing the tip of the chicks' beaks. This is done to reduce cannibalism (pecking each other, often causing serious wounds) in closely confined flocks. There is no reason to debeak chicks raised with adequate space. Plus chicks raised on free range need a full beak to forage for seeds and bugs.