Meat Chickens 2016 Round #1

OK, so the whole at least one post a week thing is seemingly still a challenge…

Boomer checks on the chicks often

Since the last post I have been doing a lot including writing a few posts that never got posted. On the 21^st I picked up 30 little baby meat chickens that are now almost three weeks old. We still have 29 of them as one died from who knows what as chicks often do. The remaining 29 are strong and healthy peeping away in my kitchen. They don’t smell so hot but at least they are alive. Below is a post I wrote almost 2 weeks ago now but never got around to sharing because I had yet to find the best way to get my pictures onto my laptop. The tale is about the first night we had the chicks and how we almost lost all of them in the first 45 minutes. Not a great night…

Here it is:

On Thursday evening I took a lovely drive along the Androscoggin River with the windows down. I played Jenny Lewis in the truck with a cardboard box in the passenger seat all ready for 30 fluffy yellow chicks. We had put in an order for 30 Cornish-Rock chicks to raise for meat and they were finally ready for pick up at a local farm. I had spent the day in Bangor at a Forestry seminar so unfortunately it was almost 7 by the time I got to the farm but the folks there were as friendly as ever and we stood around to chat for a while before I headed back home.

We already had all the equipment needed for the chicks and I had rounded it all up that morning and filled feeders and waterers so all I would need to do was move the little birds into their new home. Ideally they would be set up in the barn but because we didn’t get our wiring all done in time I decided to keep them in the house. (Something about a heat lamp run via an extension cord 24/7 just sounds like a bad plan) So the chicks would be in the basement. I got everything set up and that’s when I saw it… a large giant shed snake skin. In. My. Basement. Now these chicks were just hatched Thursday and without their downy fluff they are probably only the size of my thumb; they’d be a pretty easy target for a snake to gobble up.

 I didn’t want to disturb the chicks too much after just putting them in the brooder so I figured I would wait for Matt to come home and we’d work out what the best plan would be (he was working late on a wood chipping job) So in the meantime I called my mom to fill her in on the precious yellow puff balls. We weren’t long on the phone when I couldn’t believe how loud the chicks seemed in the basement, I mean, it was incredible. I stupidly wrote it off as chicks being chicks and kept talking until finally I decided I had better go give them a check as they’d been down there about a half hour now. The second I opened the basement door I started to panic.

Where’s the light! Why is the heat lamp off!? “Mom, I have to go. Now.”

The bulb had blown and my 30 babies were getting colder by the second but that’s not the worst of it. When I got to the brooder I freaked. Apparently, when the light went out the chicks frenzied and tipped over their waterer. They were all soaked and cold. If you know anything about baby chicks you know that that is the last thing you want… They should be kept at around 95 degrees their first week. It was maybe 65-70 in the basement and they were wet.

All thirty of them their first night after the broken heat light event

I grabbed the whole brooder and flew up the stairs, grabbed my hair dryer and got to work. If I had more time to think about it I probably would have been sobbing but there was no time. I quickly started to blow dry and fluff each little chick back to a fluffy yellow but it was obvious that some were worse off than others. I had to work fast and could only work on one bird at a time so after I fluffed some of the worse looking chicks I ended up sticking them in my shirt to stay warm while I dried the others. Not exactly glamorous, but it worked.

Imagine Matt’s surprise to come through the door to see his wife blow drying chicks with about 5 poking out of her shirt…

I tried to get him to go get a new bulb but by then, he pointed out, all the stores were closed. This is when I almost cried. He started to help clean out the soaking wet bedding and put in clean dry new stuff as I kept going.

We ended up using a crummy 60 watt light bulb over night and somehow the chicks all lived. This morning I picked up another whole unit and an extra bulb too. All the chicks are healthy and happy and seem to have fully recovered from the crisis. We were blessed this time and will hopefully be wiser the next time.



This is Goshawk, he is the runt of the group
(he is the only one with a name though)

Now I know that I should never trust last year’s equipment without a thorough test and inspection and I just need to pay better attention. I feel so stupid, but we really and truly got lucky to have not lost any of these fragile lives in the process.

As much as I would like to never let this story leave my house, I am sharing it in the hope that maybe someone will read this and be able to avoid being in the same situation with potentially worse outcomes. I caught it just in time. Check your equipment and if something just feels wrong, go check. Even if it’s for nothing you still get to go see baby birds again. Peep peep peep.

I would say "expect to see more frequent posts in the near future" but clearly that hasn't been working out well at all. So until next time! PS pigs are in the near future! Take care and whatever you are be a good one!