Coop and chick photo updat

Here's a quick look at the coop's progress and the chick who are growing so fast!
Chicken word of the day: "Chicken with it's head cut off" - a lot of activity without direction; acting hysterical or brainless (well, I guess you'd be brainless if someone cut your head off)

Jay and Matt installed the roof, which they found rather difficult to get to at some points.

Rooftop selfie while insulating the coop roof.

When we removed old insulation from our house to prepare for an air sealing project last year; I saved the insulation thinking we might need it some day...

We only insulated the coop (on left) to keep them warm in the winter.

 

Matt securing a metal roof panel on the run.

Jay and Matt installing the last metal panel on the run.

The run on the right is finished, and the chickens moved in on June 8.

The coop (the insulated part where they will stay in the winter and where their nest box will be, still needs doors. The space on the bottom will be storage for food and bedding materials, and will also have doors.

Moving day!

Prissy

Betsy (brown, in front), Flora (white, in back), Mifflin (black) and Olive.

Flora explores the ramp to the coop. The door at the top is currently boarded up.

Olive.

2-week old chicks; breeds, parents and names

Our chicks are now two weeks old (they were born on a Sunday night). I want to introduce you to them, individually, by name, breed and "owner."

Breed: Silkie
Parent: Marissa
Name: Flora
Adult weight: 4 lbs.

Distinctions: currently the largest chick, but will eventually be the smallest. Silkies are a bantam breed, meaning they are a small bird.

However, the fun part about owning a silkie is the way they look as an adult. As this one grows, up, there will be many photos, and I'll ask Marissa to write a guest post about her very fun-looking bird!

Breed: Ameraucana
Parent: Matt
Name: Betsy Ross
Adult weight: 5.5 lbs.

Distinctions: so far, the loudest and most talkative of the flock. Americana chickens are also known as "easter eggers" because they lay bluish to greenish eggs.

Betsy Ross can also be credited for the sudden move into larger quarters. The photo below is what I found when I went into the garage late last week! Betsy had found her wings!

Breed: Silver-Laced Wyandotte
Parent: Josh
Name: Olive
Adult weight: 5 lbs.

Distinctions: Olive and I have bonded. She now sits in my hand without holding her still, and often won't step off it when I lower her back into the brooder.


She will have silver-tipped feathers and is a striking bird as an adult.

Breed: Buff Orpington
Parent: Jay
Name: Prissy (Lady Priscilla d'Ova)
Adult weight: 6 lbs.

Distinctions: We've read that Buff Orpington's are the "golden retrievers" of the chicken world - that is to say, they are calm, quiet and love people. Prissy is no exception, she's probably the quietest (and at the moment, the smallest) bird in our flock. And she just hangs out with Jay, cool as a chicken could be.

Breed: Black Australorpe
Parent: all of us
Name: Mifflin, or Miffy (named after the street we live on)
Adult weight: 5-7 lbs.

Distinctions: Mifflin is our "just in case bird," but don't tell her that, and we don't really talk about it. She's also totally illegal.


"Just in case of what?" you may ask, and you might follow up with "Illegal?"

The Madison chicken ordinance allow for four hens per property. While gender identifying chicks is 95% accurate at one day old, there's still that little chance we could get a male. However, Silkie birds can't be gender identified until they are six months old, so we have a 50/50 chance of getting a rooster. And, this is nature and one of the chicks could die (disease, predator). So Miffy is our just-in-case bird. But since the ordinance is really about not annoying your neighbors, and since Matt and Marissa are in on this with us, we're not concerned about breaking the ordinance.

I just hope no one from the city is reading this :)

Photo of week-old chicks

From what I read on the hatchery's web site, our girls were born on Sunday night, so they are a week old today. We've been cuddling them daily, and they already are showing their personalities. Jay's buff orpington (called the golden retriever of chickens) is by far the calmest, and even falls asleep while Jay is holding it. Very cute.

I took their box outside the garage to get some natural light for photos, and got one good one. They are starting to grow out wing feathers already, but still have lots of fuzz on their heads and bodies.

We're going through a lot of feed, mostly because they are really messy eaters. I mean, are they bathing in the stuff? Most of our clean up is just sweeping up food crumbles they have scattered about.

Friday night Jay, Matt, Marissa and I had a lovely dinner and we continued our coop planning. We're all finding it difficult to figure out where to start, so we wrote down a bunch of our "requirements" and will likely take a big trip to the lumber yard on our first building day (May 17!)

Chick Update, Day 4

Here's a guest post, while Josh is out of town on business. I had fun on Facebook Monday, posting, "I never thought I'd hear myself say, 'my husband just left town to go pick up some chicks!'"

The girls are growing quickly! A couple of them already have feathers on their wings. We have two blond and three darker chicks. I assumed the larger blond was Prissy (Lady Priscilla d'Ova), my Buff Orpington. However, the other evening Matt stated that the Silky has five toes while the Buff only has four. Indeed, the largest of all the chicks in the Silky! Confusing, since it was supposed to be the smallest of them all. I wonder whether they hatch them early so they get a head start.

Marisa and I cleaned out the bin this morning, and I put the paper, poop and food in our compost. We checked for "pasty butt" and they're all ok. So far they're very nervous about being picked up by us. With some hand feeding and repetition, I expect they'll bond with us.

So far, three of Josh's and my Facebook friends have posted this video from YouTube and tagged us, suggesting that this will be us. Indeed, I'd love it if that were the case! This is one of the sweetest things I've seen in a while.

One of the booklets I have states the bin should be cleaned out twice a day. Marisa and I have decided that they will do evenings, and we will do mornings.

The co-parenting project is an interesting one. Coordinating with just one person (Josh) requires little effort. It will take more communication and consensus to do this with another couple. And doing this in community is just what we wanted.

Sorry no pictures this morning—more to come soon!

Guest correspondent over and out.

Five chicks

On Monday, I drove to Waterloo, Wis. to pick up five chicks. I found myself getting nervous - would they be warm enough, did we have a good brooder for them, would they all live?

When I arrived, I first saw a counter with little cartons and the sound of cheeping chicks filled the room.

There were several people in line before me, so I scanned the boxes and found ours.

We recently learned that the hatchery can't gender identify the silkies because they are so small. So on Sunday, Jay, Matt and Marissa and I decided to ask if they had another silkie. Unfortunately, they were all sold.

While I was waiting I looked around. I spotted these baskets of eggs, I'm guessing the next batch for the incubator.

Just like in the movie Mad City Chickens, I spotted the warm incubators that rotated fertilized eggs and kept them at just the right temperature.  

I paid for the birds and scurried out to my car. It was COLD and I didn't want them to get a chill. As soon as I got in my car and started it up to get the heat going, I opened the box. Inside were five fluffy cotton balls cheeping away.

The chicks are now in our brooder, a large plastic bin in our garage. Matt and Marissa have a key to get in, and I'm sure we'll all be paying many visits to ooh and ahh. They really are that cute.

Our instructions are not to handle them the first day, but then to start having them eat our of our hands and pick them up to have the imprint on us.

More to come, I'm sure.

"Where do you find them local chicks?"

As we started doing our research on getting chicks, we were surprised to find that you can mail order them! One of the reasons is because within 72 hours of hatching, chicks do not need to eat or drink. Shipping by priority mail is conveniently within that threshold.

However, after talking with Susan at Cluck the Chicken Store and reading some advice on backyardchicken.com (oh my I could spend a lot of time on that site!) we found both were emphatic about "Do not let your children open the box!" due to occasional shipping mortality. We wondered what our local options were.

Susan recommended we get our first batch at Abendroth's Hatchery in Waterloo, Wis. - just  35 minutes from Madison. They may not have the world's largest selection of chickens, but they certainly have plenty for newbies like us. And we don't have to worry about our first experience with chicks arriving with a few casualties.

At this hatchery, chicks hatch on Sunday nights, and are available on Mondays. When I spoke with someone at the hatchery, he was pretty insistent on picking up on Monday so the birds were fresh and healthy.

So Jay and I and our neighbors did some math with a calendar, and after learning that our chicks would need to be in their brooder for 6 to 8 weeks before moving into the chicken coop, we realize that we could easily order them now to be picked up on April 14 and they would be ready to move into our coop sometime after Memorial Day.

I ordered our five pullet chicks (females) to pick up in a week. Anyone want to guess how much a baby chick costs?

• Pullets are females. You do not need a rooster for a hen to lay eggs, just to lay fertile eggs.
• Straight run is you get what you get (they haven't been separated by gender).
• Cockerels are makes - they'll become rosters.

Chicks ordered - time to prepare the nursery

We did it. We ordered five chicks. If all goes well, we pick them up Monday, April 14.

Following our field trip to Paoli, Matt, Marissa, Jay and I were excited about ordering our chicks. I started reading my new book, Gardening with Chickens by Jessi Bloom; Jay paged through his first aid guide; and Matt and Marissa read through the book they bought at Cluck the Chicken Store. We exchanged a few emails over the week, and settled on getting five chicks. 

Five? The city of Madison only allows four. Even though we're getting them from a local hatchery which will dramatically reduce mortality, just in case one of the chicks doesn't make it, we want to have four the same age in our flock. And as I said to Matt, “Five is okay as long as our neighbor doesn't complain” :-)

We decided that each couple would pick out a pair of birds, and of course I decided to throw in that third. Unlike going to the pet store, we simply called an order into the hatchery. The following images are what they will look like when mature; photos and descriptions are from the hatchery.

Matt and Marissa chose to get an Americana, also known as an Easter Egger, known for their bluish and greenish eggs. 

They also chose a Silkie, a smallish hen that has five toes, lays smallish eggs but are the cutest thing you ever did see.

Jay chose to get a Buff Orpington. It's a largish bird, but is quiet and is supposed to have a friendly disposition.

Actually, what we've learned is that if handled gently and with love, most chickens will become friendly.

I decided on a Silver-Laced Wyandotte. It has beautifully-tipped feathers, lays large brown eggs and will get to about five pounds.

Our fifth chicken, which I'm going to say doesn't belong to anyone in particular, is a Black Australorp, which has glossy black plumage with a greenish purple sheen, and weighs about 5 to 7 pounds.

While we read that indeed, birds of a feather flock together, we also learned that in a flock where no one looks the same, no one in particular gets picked on because everybody is different. We're hoping these birds look sufficiently different from each other that they all end up getting along.

I will write a little more about the hatchery in a future post. For now, were very excited that we made the phone call to order them.