Chicken Update

We have chickens!!!  The ability to house animals has been a something I've looked forward to and even thought about as a balancer to some of the sacrifices of rural life (e.g. no longer living across the street from a giant grocery store).

I had originally assumed we would order from one of the larger hatcheries, but as we did our research we learned that at many hatcheries the demand for hens so outweighs the demand for male chicks that males are often disposed of shortly after hatching.  This did not match sync with our vision of being stewards of the land and animals, so we started looking into local options thinking that smaller scale operations were likely better equipped to handle this challenge.

The chicks traveled home in a small post office box.

We learned that a neighbor just down the road from us hatches chicks, and had Rhode Island Reds and Buff Orpington's hatching this month.  The chicks are be "straight run", meaning we'll get a mix of male and female chicks.  We're not set up to house roosters, but our neighbor has offered to buy the roosters back from us after a few months when the sex becomes apparent.

The brooder the chicks came from.  The hatchers said that they usually leave them in the
brooder for about 12 hours after they hatch, until their feathers become soft and poofy

The chicks spent their first night in a large storage tupperware under a heat lamp.  I had purchased cedar chips to use as their bedding but then read in the backyardchickens.com forums that cedar shavings have an oil in the wood that is poison to chickens.  Last night we had enough of the shavings we were sent home with to get by.  So, today I'll be marching back to the store to return my giant bag of cedar shavings for pine shavings which appear to be the bedding of choice.

Buying chicks looks like serious business in this photo.  Definitely the photographer was not referring to the chickens as "chicki-doos" at this moment. 

We have friends, cousins, nieces and nephews who are up to the task of helping us name the chicks.   Names to date include, "Chickie Nikki", "Beauregard", "Clucky" and "Nugget".  Which just goes to show that chickens are the original creativity muse....right?!?  We have 16 more chickies to name, and are open to suggestions.