Keeping Chickens

Baby Chicks

Well the baby chicks have arrived!

After much searching we eventually found some baby cream legbar chicks back at our local breeder at Southmead Poultry, which is incidentally where our other girls have come from.

Tracy at Southmead Poultry has put up with me phoning on a almost weekly basis, asking whether she had any baby Cream Legbar chicks available, and as always has been sympathetic to our plight and free with excellent advice.

We felt like expectant parents again as we phoned on the morning after hatching to check how many baby chicks had made it. Luckily four of the hatch were girls, so later that day we hot footed it down to Southmead Poultry to pick them up.

One of the reasons we picked the cream legbar breed of chicken was that they are auto-sexing as day old chicks. The boys have a very easily distinguishable yellow spot on their heads, so we knew we were definitely getting girls; who tend to be slightly darker and more stripy.

We knew our neighbours would probably not be too impressed with cockerels, plus we do not have the space for them, so this way they were taken out of the equation.

Cream legbar chickens are a very pretty silvery speckled bird that apparently tames down well and best of all lays pale blue eggs!

Once we got our new baby chicks back to the house we settled them into their new home. This was constructed of a large cardboard box with newspaper on the floor and a wire mesh lid, a small saucer of food and a red drinker.

Baby chicks can drown easily in open water troughs, so it is worth investing in a chick drinker. They are fairly inexpensive plus chicks are supposed to like the colour red!

Of course one of the most essential additions to the brooder box for the baby chicks is a heat lamp. This is positioned towards one corner of the box. That way if the chicks are too warm they can move away. I also added a reptile thermometer on the floor to keep a check on the temperature - which should be around 37 C (or 95 F) for the first week.

The temerature can then be reduced by around 5 degrees a week until the environment in which the baby chicks are kept in reaches ambient temperature. This is achieved by raising the lamp, until hopefully at around 3-4 weeks or when the birds are fully feathered it can be removed altogether.

The brooding box needs to be sited in a quiet, secure, draft free area. We have a small outhouse/utility room which is ideal. We set the box up the evening before so we could check that the lamp was working properly and maintaing a good temperature for the baby chicks to be introduced into.

For the first couple of days we just had newspaper on the floor; chicks peck at anything at their feet and we wanted to make sure they knew where the feeder was before they filled up on sawdust! Although we changed the paper frequently as they are quite messy, and it is very important (as with any poultry) to keep them clean to prevent disease. Straw is too ‘big’ for the chicks feet and not really absorbant enough.

As we introduced the baby chicks to the brooder we dipped their beaks in the ’drinker‘ so they knew where it was; then we left them completely alone, (much to the childrens annoyance!) as they were still quite sleepy after their ’struggle out of the egg’ and we wanted them to recover from the car journey and settle into their new home.

A good method of checking whether the temperature of the brooding box is right, is to check on the behaviour of the chicks. If they are huddled together under the heat lamp the temperature may be too low; alternatively if they are far away from the lamp it may be too hot.

Of course it is important that the feeder and drinker is close to the heat source so the baby chicks don’t get too chilled when eating and drinking. Happy baby chicks we’ve been told should be fairly active and move in and out of the heat source freely.

The feeder was filled with fresh chick crumbs. This is fed for the first 6 weeks or so, it is small so can fit in their small beaks, also it is full of all the nutrients that the baby chicks will need; but do remember to check the expiry date on the feed sack as we have been caught out by that before!

Once the chicks were settled and happy after a few days we moved them onto a deep sawdust bed. It is important not too keep them on newspaper too long as not only are chicks very messy, but they can suffer from ’splayed legs’, as they slip about a bit on the paper.

We all stroke and cuddle the chicks on a daily basis, including our 3 and 1 year old who are amazingly gentle and calm. The chicks are growing incredibly fast and already getting wing feathers. They are also getting strong, chasing each other around and scratching at the floor like their grown up counterparts, I was quite pleased that we added a wire mesh lid to the brooder box!

The utility room where they are is next to the kitchen and it is lovely to hear the occassionally ‘cheep cheep’ whilst washing up - i shall miss them when they are ready to go outside. Once they are fully feathered up they can go out on warm sunny days from 5-6 weeks although they may not be ready to live full time outside until older.

When they are ready to go out permanently we hope to put them in the seperate run inside the main run. So our old girls can get used to the idea, although we will not mix them until the baby chicks are nearer their size, probably around point of lay.

So there’s the story so far about our new arrivals, we’ll attempt to add a few pictures and updates as time allows over the coming weeks as our new baby chicks grow.

To view a video of our new baby chicks see below.

 

Baby Chicks.