Chicks! (Finally)

This chicken keeping business has been a series of misadventures and I've only had chicks in my possession for 24 hours!

You might remember that my order of chickens was scheduled to arrive between March 6-8. Despite the shipping notice I received from Meyer Hatchery on March 6th, they never shipped my birds. A couple of phone calls and an angry message or two later, they finally admitted their mistake and agreed to ship my birds the following week.

The next week came and I got a phone call early Monday morning from Meyer. They were packing my order for shipment but two of the breeds I ordered were not available (Silver Laced Wyandotte and Columbian Wyandotte). They offered me a list of breeds as substitutes - which would I prefer? None of the breeds they offered were on my list of breeds of survival chickens. I hadn't researched any of them. I probably should have just taken a refund for those chicks, but I randomly chose two interesting sounding breeds: Silver Lakenvelder and Salmon Faverolle. They sounded exotic and expensive, just like myself. Ha ha.

After I got off the phone, I was able to take a look at the catalog and learn about the breeds I had chosen. The Salmon Faverolle should be OK, but the Silver Lakenvelder isn't a breed I would have chosen if I had been given more time to think about it. Oh well.

Fast forward to yesterday morning. The post office called just after 6 AM to inform me that my chickens had arrived. I hurried into town, grabbed the very loudly peeping box, and headed back home.

When we opened the box, this is the sight that greeted us.

Chicks huddle together when they are cold

Aw, the poor little things were so cold! I gently took each chick out individually and introduced them to their new home.

Dip each chick's beak in the water as you put them in the brooder

It is really important that the chicks learn where the water is when they enter the brooder. I dipped each one's beak in the water and watched them swallow before putting them under the heat lamp. The marbles in the water dish are a bit of insurance that the wee beasties won't drown.

Home sweet home

It wasn't long before the whole crew was exploring their new home. But wait a second. Count the chicks.

There are only 16 chicks here. I ordered 17. Yep, Meyer Hatchery shorted me a chick. Needless to say, they have permanently lost my business. That's really too bad because they are one of the few hatcheries that require only three chicks as their minimum order. All but one of the chicks arrived very healthy.

Do you see the chick in the lower right corner of the above photo with the dark thing on its rear? That is the remains of its umbilical cord. It is not unusual for chicks to have a bit of the umbilical cord remaining, but this is a very large umbilical stump. A couple of hours later, this chick was lying motionless on the floor of the brooder. The other chicks piled on top off her and picked at her sore bottom. We had noticed before that she was smaller than the other chicks and her posture was a bit different than theirs. She seemed weak and fragile. By this point, we thought that she was a goner for sure. I started thinking through the elements of the funeral service that my children would surely demand. "Dearly beloved, we gather here today to lay Runt to rest...."

Hubby Dear, however, can apparently doctor chickens as well as he can humans. He separated Runt from the rest of the flock and managed to get her to eat a bit of scrambled egg (it sounds wrong, but it is a good food for chicks). He stayed up late last night working on his NCAA tournament brackets and by the time he finally came to bed, she was back up and running around again.

Several of the chicks have experienced pasty butt. When chicks are stressed or cold, their droppings can accumulate over their vent. If you don't remove the droppings, it will actually seal their vent shut and kill the chicks. A gentle wipe with a warm, wet washcloth takes care of the problem.

Now the chicks run when they see me coming because they know I'm going to pick them up and look at their butts.

The chick with the feathered legs and toes is the Salmon Faverolle. 

Their feathers are already starting to come in. They won't be babies for very long, so we're enjoying this stage while it lasts. Come August, these girls will hopefully be laying oodles of eggs. 

The Perfect Survival Chicken: Selecting a Chicken Breed

This is part two of my chicken keeping series. Those of you who have been keeping chickens for years will have to excuse the new girl's giddy excitement. And please chime in with your own opinions in the comments!

If you missed part one, check it out here:
Part I: Peeps or Pullets? Ways to Get Started in Chicken Keeping

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Once I coerced Hubby Dear into the whole chicken keeping business and decided to start with chicks ordered through the mail, it was time to decide on a chicken breed. If you've never paid much attention to chickens before, it might surprise you to find out just how many breeds there are out there. The hatchery I settled on as the source for my chicks, Meyer Hatchery, carries literally dozens of breeds.

What should you buy? That depends on your answer to the following question: Why are you keeping chickens?

• Are you mostly interested in eggs? There are breeds out there that will reliably pump out 300 eggs a year. 
• Do you envision your chickens mostly as a meat source? You'll want to raise chickens that dress out into plump carcasses and put on weight quickly. 
• Would you like chickens for both their meat and eggs? There are breeds that are good for both, though they will not produce as many eggs as the best layers or put on weight as fast as the dedicated meat birds. 

From a preparedness standpoint, it makes sense to choose a breed from the last category, the so-called dual purpose breeds. If you were facing a crisis of some kind that would definitely be the type of bird you would be interested in because they are so versatile. Here are some other considerations for those of us of the preparedness mindset:

• Some breeds are better at foraging for their food than others. In the event that you have to completely free-range your chickens, it is important to select a breed that is active and does well outside of complete confinement. 
• You'd want a breed that would go broody (attempt to hatch chicks on their own). We humans have removed broodiness from the genetic makeup of many poultry breeds. That's great if you want to create birds that lay continuously (broody birds stop laying and focus completely on their clutch of eggs), but that is not so good if you want to expand your flock naturally (ie. without an incubator or a hatchery order). It goes without saying that you'll need a rooster if you want fertile eggs. Chickens will lay eggs without a rooster, but it still takes a rooster strutting around the chicken yard to make babies. 
• You would want a breed that agrees with your climate. Some chickens tolerate heat well; others are perky even in bitter cold. In a grid down situation, you're not going to be able to heat or cool your hen house artificially. And who wants to do that, anyway? Why not pick a breed that is suited to your climate and make it easy on everyone?

A last consideration has less to do with survival and more to do with you. What kind of personality do you feel comfortable working around? Some breeds are more flighty or have a history of aggression. Others are usually calm. Some breeds tend to be friendly and personable with their human caretakers while others couldn't care less about you.

After sifting through all these factors, we decided to select a dual-purpose breed that had known broody tendencies, does well free-ranging, handles cold weather and is generally docile. That still left me with many, many chicken breeds to pick from. In the end, I couldn't pick just one breed. I selected nine! We may decide later that a certain breed is our favorite and stick with it, but for now I can't help but smile in anticipation of the multi-colored display that will soon be pecking around my chicken moat.

These are the breeds we selected for our seventeen chickens:

Buff Orpington
Image from backyardchickens.com

Buff Orpington is the breed we ordered the most of. We want a rooster for our little flock and decided to purchase a Buff Orpington cockerel, too.

Black Australorp
Image from backyardchickens.com

Columbian Wyandotte
Image from http://chicksnchillens.blogspot.com

Golden Laced Wyandotte. Could they be any more spectacular?
Image from http://www.freewebs.com/djchooks/goldlacedwyandotte.htm

Silver Laced Wyandotte - too pretty to resist!
Image from mypetchicken.com

Easter Eggers
Image from redtractorranch.com

Easter Eggers are kind of an interesting breed. They are a bit of a mongrel breed that is kept primarily because they lay eggs in shades of green, blue, or pink. From what I've read, they vary on the outside just as much as the color of their eggs. Who knows if my girls will resemble the pullets pictured above?

Delaware - The Thinker's pick for prettiest chicken
Image from http://www.hobbyfarmliving.com/chicken-breeds-backyard-flock/

Speckled Sussex
Image from washingtonfeatherfanciers.webs.com

Barred Plymouth Rock
Image from Wikipedia

Any good book about chickens will have charts detailing the attributes of the various breeds. My favorite chicken reference for this purpose is  Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens. I found the hatchery websites to be very helpful, too.

If you raise chickens, what breeds do you have? Do you raise them primarily for eggs, meat, or both? If you don't have chickens but wish you did, what do you think you would do?