The Good Old Days

Anyone who is the parent of two or more children who are not twins does a lot of mental comparing. Not in a bad way, mind you. It's more like "How old was Johnny when he first walked?" "How old was Susie when she started talking?" It's a natural thing.

I've been doing a lot of mental comparisons with the last group of chicks, and I think that my memory isn't quite perfect. For instance, I recall the baby chicks eating out of our hands from nearly day one. This batch won't come near me, no matter what I hold out to them. This evening I took some fresh blackberries down with me when I went to tuck everyone in for the night, and despite the fact that I stayed there kneeling on the hard floor with my hand full of berries there in the shavings, they weren't coming anywhere near. They just had no curiosity about the berries at all. Even after I put one down in the shavings and took my hand away, they weren't interested. They pushed at it and stepped on it, but it didn't look like food to them.

Then there's the poop issue. The last lot were in a slightly larger enclosure, but even so, they only needed their shavings to be changed every other day. This group need to be changed daily. DAILY. That's a lot of poop. And, even though they're only a week old, these aren't the cute little draps of baby poop that the other little chicks left. These are miniature chicken turds. They are NOT CUTE.

Now, where does all this poop come from? The old chicks got fed twice a day - morning and night. In that time, they would have gone through approximately half the food in the feeders, and we'd top them off because the lower down the food got, the harder it was to reach. This batch is cleaning the feeders out two and a half times a day. I say two and a half because the food dishes are empty in the morning when we first go down, they're empty again when the kid comes home from school and feeds them, and they're half empty four hours later when they're shut up for the night. It's not unusual to see one of the chicks with its head in the trough, fast asleep.

I'm trying to recall when the last batch of chicks first started testing their wings. I seem to recall that it was at least two weeks before the chicks started trying to fly. As I was squatting there in the coop, holding still so they'd take the stupid blackberries, I watched one of the australorps do a power-assisted hop up onto the waterer, which is fully three times his height. Then I realized that all the chicks were doing little power-assisted hops and I was immediately grateful that the cardboard shutting them into their little area of the coop is fully two feet high. It'll be at least another week before they can get over that. And even if they do, the wall separating them from the rest of the henhouse is four feet tall. Even the adult chickens can't hop it.

It might be time to extend the coop a little.