(Those of you who have
raised chicks several times are probably bored by our chick
updates.  There’s nothing really startling going on yet, but we’ve
only raised chicks once before, so it’s relatively new territory for
us.  Feel free to skip these “they’re growing!” posts if you’re
not interested.  If you do like them and are a new reader, you can
see what our
chicks were doing in their first week here.)



By the end of week 2, our chicks got
spunky.  They already had the beginnings of wing feathers when I
posted last, but now they rounded out their full complement of
primaries, secondaries, and tertiaries and started making hop-flights
to test their wings.



On day 14 of their stay
in the brood box, I walked into their room and found an escaped chick
skittering across the floor.  The brood box that had originally
seemed so spacious was now a crowded mass of pecking, scratching
chicks, and they were clearly feeling cramped.  The next day, two
chicks got out, and Mark pushed through the abnormal spring heat to
make them a coop. 
As always, I’m thrilled by his ability to take a handful of screws and
some junk out of the barn and make a utilitarian piece of farm
equipment for just a few bucks.

We moved the chicks out
to their new coop when they were only 16 to 17 days old. 
Depending on who you talk to, you can put your chicks outside somewhere
between two and six weeks of age.  This is quite a wide variation
and will depend on two main factors.  Your weather is the obvious
one — if you’re raising chicks in the winter, you will clearly need
to keep them inside longer.  Sex is also important since cockerels
generally grow faster and are ready to go out on pasture much quicker
than pullets.  As a rule of thumb, chickens should have real
feathers, not just fluff, if you’re going to put them outside without a
light source.



Ours clearly haven’t
reached that stage yet, so I begged Mark to make a little protected
area within the large coop where the chicks could huddle together at
night.  He came up with an insulated box that will hold the heat
from the brooder lamp for another week or two while our chicks
mature.  With the extra heat to run to if they get cold, our
chicks adore their dirt-floored coop and are now taste-testing
everything within reach.  Sticks, stones, ants, and leaves all met
with approval, although I’m not sure if they are actually finding
anything with food value yet.



Next week —
pasture!  While you’re waiting, be sure check out our homemade chicken
waterer, perfect for
getting chicks off to a healthy start.

In our quest for good foraging
chicken breeds, I started to wonder — is foraging ability in
chickens learned or is it innate?  The answer seems to be a little
bit of both.

Pecking is an innate chicken behavior.  In one study, scientists
placed a window in a developing chicken egg so that they could study
the chick’s behavior in the shell.  The chicks pecked even before
they hatched, clearly proving that pecking is ingrained in their
genetics.

While pecking is innate, foraging is learned.  You can see
chickens learning to forage when you give day old chicks their first
food dish.  It may take a few minutes for the chickens to discover
the food, but when one bird finds it, all of the rest soon
follow.  So I continue to think that it’s important to get our
broilers out on pasture ASAP so that they can learn more foraging
behavior.

Even if you don’t plan to raise your chickens in a forest pasture,
it’s useful to understand the root of pecking behavior.  Chickens
in wild
conditions spent up to 90% of their time foraging, which equated to
15,000 pecks per day.  When placed in a confined space with high
quality food that is consumed in a matter of minutes, though, chickens
often misplace their foraging behavior into pecking at each
other.  The result — called feather
pecking — can be bloody and disturbing.

We’ve discovered that our automatic
chicken waterer solves this problem since it gives chickens
something to peck at other than their neighbors.  We also like to
scatter our feed on the ground to give our chickens more foraging time,
and to raise them in chicken
tractors where plenty of plants and bugs are present for
supplemental food.  Giving your chickens a more positive outlet
for their pecking behavior seems to work well at preventing feather
pecking in even a confined flock.