Got Chicks!

What would be your first thought if your phone were to ring at 3:52am? My initial thought was, "Oh, no. What's wrong?" I didn't actually get to the phone in time to find out, so at 3:53am on Thursday, March 25th, I dialed our voice mail box, wondering if whoever it was had left a message. Of all the thoughts going through my head, it didn't once occur to me that it would be the Medford postal distribution center, letting us know our chicks had arrived in Medford. Did we want to come get them or should they go out to Cave Junction on the 6:45am truck? We opted for the latter, mostly because even if we had run out of the house still in our PJ's, we couldn't have had them home much sooner than they would arrive at the local post office (8am).

It was 3:55 in the morning, and we were in a bit of a pickle. After a crazy and anticlimactic Wednesday, which we spent both preparing and waiting for the chicks' arrival, we still weren't quite ready, because we had forgotten about one, extremely major consideration: the weather!

Welcome to the world of farming, right? Milan is used to working with software and machines, which are very, very predictable, once you understand their inner workings. If you take the time to carefully research, plan, design and redesign, a first-shot-out-of-the box attempt is usually successful. There's little you can't be prepared for or plan in advance when working with machines. But, the elements? Animals? We have no control over the former, and less than we think over the latter! So when it was absolutely pouring buckets at 4am, we knew we needed to scrap the original plan and come up with a bad-weather solution for these little, barely-24-hours-old chicks.

We decided to start the chicks indoors in a brooder setting, much like what you see at Grange Coop during chick-buying season. We trooped outside and started with the only empty horse trough on the place. Luckily, it was sitting upside down, so the inside was dry, and the outside nicely rain washed. We brought it inside the sun room, cleaned out the cobwebs, and bedded it down with dry pine shavings. We rigged in two heat lamps to start warming things up. We brought in bricks out of the garden and put them under the wood stove to dry out before placing them under the water jars (the extra lift off the shavings keeps the water cleaner). We filled the feed troughs with organic chick starter and a sprinkle of cherry stone grit, and the water jars with a warm, vitamin and electrolyte water solution.

Like clockwork, our phone rang again at 8:05am. "Your chicks are here!" announced the postmaster, their wild peeping unmistakeably audible in the background. Milan dashed out the door to go pick them up, while I hurriedly fed Jack.

At 8:20, Milan was back with very loud box! In the upper right corner of the box, you can see a stamp: "Hatched MARCH 24 2010 8:00am". I blogged a little about shipping live animals in the last few paragraphs of a previous post, "The Final Hours Before The Chicks Arrival". Milan and I were both a little nervous to open the box; we were steeling ourselves for the possibility of finding a dead chick or two. Off came the lid. Wow, what a little mass of fluffy yellow peepers! And, glory be! All 100 seemed in fine shape.

One by one, we plucked them out of their shipping box, dunked their beaks in the vitamin and electrolyte water, making sure they each got a couple swallows, and set them free in their new environment. Here, you see Milan doing the pluck-dunk shuffle (Jack had been told a stern, "No!", when it came to touching the chicks, so meanwhile he busied himself with the fly swatter. We made sure he didn't swat any chicks!).

So, we have definitely "Got chicks!" I would say we are now officially embarked on our chicken-raising adventure.