I decided to do an update on our chickens.
When I first got them, I thought that the hardest part of raising chickens was going to the hatchery to pick them up. This couldn’t be farthest from the truth. I ran into such trouble the first day, I still can’t believe that they are living now. I’ve attached the original email that I sent out to my family along with a recent picture of the chickens. These chickens are so funny. When I go to feed them they have their routine. The same chickens get to sit on the top of the fence that’s in the coop and there is a certain black speckled chicken that always has to come over and see if my toe nail polish is really polish or if it’s a strawberry in disguise. (they LOVE strawberries!) But I’ll take this routine over what I went through at the beginning.
This is the email sent out in early April about bringing home the chickens:
Date: Thu, 14 Apr 2011
If you ever get asked if you need a heat lamp when you have 48 baby chickens in your house the answer is yes. Below is what happened to me today.
I picked up my new little 48 fancy chickens today in Decorah and all was well. I stopped off at Ma’s to show her and was anxious to get them home so I skipped the invitation at the White House – Ma’s treat.
When I got home I brought the chickens into the house because of the stupid crazy wind outside and thought that it would be soooo much better there for them. They were making tons of noise and I thought that this really worked out well. I usually keep the house chilly during the day so I thought I better turn the heat up to 70 so they could keep warm. I thought about the heat lamp but thought to myself ‘Why would they need a heat lamp? it’s 70 degrees in here?
So I had some stuff to do around the house and the noise gradually got quieter and I thought they must have settled down. WRONG!!! When I went to check on them they were all bunched up in the corner and only about 10 were walking around. OH MY GOD!! It looked like they all dunked themselves into the water and made a death pile!!!! The 10 alive chicks were walking on top of the pile of other chicks. When I reached into the pile of wet chicks it looked like when you clean a drain and pick out a bunch of gunky hair that’s dripping. OK so then I went outside and ran around like the Road Runner and was looking for a heat lamp. First I ran to the chicken house – no heat lamp, then to where the pheasants are – no heat lamp, no heat lamp in the new milkhouse, old milkhouse, hog house, and where we had puppies in the barn. Finally I found one in the other part of the barn. Ran to the house!! No lamp. So ran downstairs and got a lamp and it worked. yea!! So now I picked up these wet soggy maybe dead(?) chickens and started to heat them up. (I kinda was cooking them with the lamp) I put 4 aside because they looked really really bad. After a couple of hours of kinda cooking or heating them up I got them all back to life and even took 2 from the really really dead pile and revived them. So I have no idea why they all wanted to kill themselves but everyone is doing well (but the 2). Daryl wanted to bring them outside tonight and I told them NO WAY!! I worked way too hard to put them outside tonight! So now we have 46 chickens in our house with 50 pounds of feed. It kind of smells funky in here.
So when someone asks you if you need a heat lamp if you bring baby chickens into your house – you can say back with confidence Yes!
Now here is a picture of some of the girls taken today. All is well in the chicken coop.
Our girls today - looking good!