Ordering the Chicks!!

We wanted to get the Chicken Coop mostly built before we ordered the chickens because if we ordered them too soon we wouldn't have a place for them to sleep.  And they can't sleep in my bed!  It took a lot of planning and organizing so we could order the chickens at the perfect time so they could move into their house when they are ready.

Now, ordering the chickens was an interesting ordeal.  You can actually order chickens through the mail!  We ordered our chickens from a very cool chicken farm in Texas.  The chickens were sent through the mail overnight to our house.  The scary part about this is that baby chicks need a lot of heat to survive, so we needed to pick up the babies as soon as they came in.  My wife picked them up from the post office at 8:00 AM right when they came in.  All of the chicks survived the long journey.

You might wonder how the chicks survive without eating that whole time.  Well, for the first 48-72 hours after they come out of the shell chickens can survive without food or water.  They still ingest their yolk sac from when they were in the egg.  I thought this was very cool!

Once we picked up the chicks we brought them home and put them in their new home for the next few weeks.  Since baby chickens do not have all their feathers yet they need to have a heat source to keep them nice and warm, or else they will not survive. Here is a picture of their home for the first few weeks and they grow:

The chicks really liked their new home. It is made out of an old dog crate with pine shavings on the bottom and paper towel over top.  The light that is hanging down has a heat bulb that makes the area underneath them nice and warm.  For the first week the temperature of the area needs to be 95 degrees.  Week 2 needs to be 90 degrees and week 3 is 85 degrees.  It goes down 5 degrees each week until they are ok with whatever temperature is in the house or outside.  By 8 weeks they should be able to handle Wisconsin Fall temperatures.  That is when they will move outside.

Another interesting fact about baby chicks is how they drink water.  After they are put in their home they need to be shown where the water is located.  To do this we had to pick up each chick and put its beak in the water.  Then they will come back and drink from it.  I thought that was very interesting.  We didn't have to do that for the food though.

Here are a few pictures of the chickens:

Make a reply to my post if you have any comments of questions!!

More to come soon!