Baby Chicks Arrived!

Baby Chicks In New Home (Tub) With Heat Plates, Etc.

When Ed and I placed our order for egg laying pullets in February at the local feed store, we were able to pick a general date that we wanted them to be available for pick up. There were no guarantees with this date but that would be the target.

Also when we placed the order, we programmed the name of the feed store and the phone # they'd be calling from in our phones. We did this at their suggestion because they said that nowadays they have problems reaching people about their orders; no one answers their phone and voice mail boxes are often full.

This morning, I got the call as was expected. I did a quick check of our basement set-up, plugged it all in to make sure the chicks would be warm enough, had a concern that things weren't quite warm enough, called up to Ed to take a look and get his thoughts, changed out a heat lamp bulb, and finally, once satisfied - I left to go get our new additions. (The car ride home was almost unbearably hot as I had the heater on full blast on a 55 degree morning... the chicks liked it though...)

This round of chicks is meant to provide backfill for our older chickens that are aging out of egg laying and to provide eggs in the winter. We ordered pullets (females) which are a bit more expensive than a straight run. Even with ordering pullets, there is a 90% chance that any given chick is actually a cockerel. But that's OK - we can manage one (or two?) more rooster(s).

The first time we ordered pullets back in 2023, we got all "brown egg layers"; brown egg layers are sort of a generic commercial egg layer. This time we got brown, red, and black egg layers as well as some "hatchery's choice" of commercial easter egg layers. Because there was a minimum order of 4 birds per "type", we ended up ordering 16 in all.

So far so good with the chicks appearing to be happy. Now we've just got to keep it that way...