A Chick Check Up

How do you like this new time?  I am not fond of it.  When I get home it is dark and it is difficult to get anything done outside.  That relegates my activities to indoor projects.  Ugh...  Yesterday I went to the garage and was just "puttering around." Do you ever putter around?  It takes great skill and patience to putter around.  To the untrained eye, when you are puttering around, it looks like you are just wasting time, but  unorganized action and lack of a clear goal aside, puttering can be therapeutic and somewhat productive.  I'm an accomplished putterer and it has taken years to perfect my craft.

Yesterday afternoon I was in the garage, deeply engaged in putterishness.  The outside temperature was dropping and I wanted to make sure that our 24 Barred Rock pullet chicks would continue to be comfortable in the brooder.  The thick bed of hay and the heat lamp provides a perfect environment for little growing chicks.  I added a little more chick feed to the tray and watched them jump in the tray and instinctively scratch with their little feet at the feed.

These are perhaps the most healthy birds that we've ever received in the mail.  They have been so lively since day 1.  They seem to be eating as much as we give them and drinking plenty of water.  At this point, they haven't soiled the hay in the bottom of the brooder such that the garage stinks and that is a good thing.  I have some repair work to do on the chicken tractors in the pasture before I move them out of the garage and that will require daylight, or Saturday or Sunday, to get that done.

But before we move them outside they have to have gotten feathers.  I decided to pick up one of the little chicks and inspect her 'featherization.'  (I think I just coined a word.)  When I tried to pick one up they all scattered, frightened by me.  Finally I snatched one little girl up and held her in my hand. While she's still mostly got the fuzz or down or whatever you call it, she does have something resembling feathers growing on the tips of her wings.  Can you see them?

"A bird in the hand..."

Let's take a closer look.  There.  I stretched out her wing and a uniform row of perfectly formed wing feathers appears, letting me know that our chicks are quickly developing.  That's a good thing.  The shortened days, molting adult hens, and reduced amount of protein available on our pasture have caused the adult hens' egg production to drop to about 2 dozen a day when we were collecting about 6 dozen a day previously.  These 24 chicks will be laying eggs in about 22 weeks, if all goes according to plan, and will supplement the egg production of our existing flock.

Wing feathers coming in

The little chick was getting impatient with me holding her and I put her back with her 23 other friends so they could eat until they were full and then bask in the radiant glow of the heat lamp. Other chickens sit under a heat lamp on the stainless steel counter at Popeye's.  Not ours.  These fortunate chicks will soon be out on pasture and will live out the rest of their days on green grass, eating bugs and worms, scratching through cow patties, taking dust baths and doing other important chicken activities.

It's high time I put the chick back in the brooder.  I have more puttering around to get done.