Last week our buff orpington chicks arrived in the mail!
Seventeen came in the boxes, but two of them didn’t survive the transport, so that left us with fifteen fluffy yellow chicks.
We rigged up a brooder out of a big stock tank, hung a heat lamp over it and laid wire and cardboard over the top.
Unfortunately, the brooder was too deep to just have the heat lamp hanging over the top, so we had to make an opening in the wire to lower the light in a little ways to keep the chicks warm enough.
We hoped that the cats wouldn’t try to get in the hole past the heat lamp… but turns out they were a lot more gutsy than we gave them credit for.
Sunday afternoon, I went to check on them after church and found nine dead birds, three missing ones, and cat hair on the edge of the wire top. And a very sluggish looking cat in the loft…
Amazingly, the three remaining chicks looked a little roughed up, but were otherwise uninjured. They stayed huddled pretty close together for the rest of the day, poor babies must’ve been scared to death! PJ gave them some extra clover and greens from the yard to try to help them feel better (and she said we should eat the cats lol).
We rigged up a smaller brooder out of a plastic bin and bungie-corded a wire panel over it, but we knew that could only be a temporary solution since we would still need a bigger brooder for the flock of fifty meat birds we have coming next month.
So yesterday Cody and kids built a new brooder that would be wide enough to fit all the chicks and shallow enough to be able to hang the heat lamp over the top.
And since they were building a bigger brooder anyway… I headed down to the feed store and picked up some more chicks!
They didn’t have buff orpintons in stock, so I just picked a fun variety. I got three Chocolate Orpingtons, one Olive Egger, and three each of two other breeds (I don’t remember which ones off the top of my head).
It sucks to loose a whole flock of baby chicks, but we learned a lesson about securing against predators. Especially with cats around!
Might give some thought to reenforcing the chicken run too…
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