A POULTRY MINI-MANUAL
(Page 4 of 6)
Our baby chickens arrived one day late. Surprisingly, they
looked none the worse for their stay in the cardboard box.
We dipped the beak of each one into warm water and set the
babies under the brooder. You should make a fence of
cardboard or sheet metal to keep the chicks from wandering
away and losing the warm place. After a couple of weeks you
can begin moving the fence (gradually!) away from the
heater. Round off any square corners with cardboard because
if the chicks become chilled they may pile up in a corner
and smother the little guys on the bottom.
RELATED CONTENT
Baby chicks are just as cute as you remember and we
couldn't stay away from ours the first few days. We had
three different types: Traditional yellow fluff; brown with
darker brown stripes on their backs; and beige with brown
stripes. The yellow ones grew up white (probably Plymouth
Rocks), the brown are now beautiful reddish-brown with
black tails (maybe a Rhode Island Red cross) and the beige
matured into white with black spots (possibly Barred Rock).
We were fortunate enough to meet an organic farmer
who—though our age and raised in the
suburbs—has lived on his farm for 10 years. We ask
his advice on most farm-type ventures. When we inquired
about commercial chick starters, he told us that hatchery
chicks are not nearly as hardy as farm-raised and we should
probably use the widely-sold medicated mash for a few
weeks. I asked at the feed store to see the list of
ingredients in chick starter and found that it contains
many grains, lots of synthetic vitamins (even some HEW
doesn't recognize as essential to people) and a form of
antibiotic called Amprolium. We didn't want
antibiotics in our eggs or chicken meat so we decided to
feed the medicated mash for as short a period as possible.
The chicks filled out and grew very fast on the
starter and were sprouting little wing feathers in one
week. By the time they were two weeks old they were already
scraggy and homely looking. Then, at two to three weeks of
age, a few of our chicks developed coccidiosis. Or, at
least, that's what the symptoms appeared to be (there's
nothing like pouring over a good book of chicken diseases!)
The sick chicks looked droopy, weak and had dirty behinds.
Occasionally we'd see blood in the droppings. We removed
the sick ones to a little pen where they either got better
or died. We only lost 6 or 7 chicks and learned that some
poultry raisers allow a mild outbreak of coccidiosis as an
immunization.
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