Author: Anna & Mark

As I briefly mentioned
earlier, we swapped
six chicks with a friend.  She wanted to try out
our heirloom varieties and we wanted in on her hatchery order so we
could add some better layer genes to our flock.  We decided to
meet halfway, about 45 minutes to an hour from each of our houses, to
do the swap.  Which left us with a dilemma — how would we keep
the chicks warm for several hours away from house electricity?



The obvious solution, and the
one my friend took, was to plug an inverter into the cigarette-lighter
plug and attach that to a heat pad.  She preheated the pad before
leaving home, put her chicks in quite a small box with a lid loosely
over the top, and let the chicks ride on residual heat all the way down
to our meetup spot.  The chicks seemed quite happy with that
arrangement, although Sarah did decide to plug them in for the ride
home.  (I didn’t think to take any photos of her
car-brooder, so all the images here are of mine.)



Unfortunately, we realized at
the last minute that our cigarette-lighter doesn’t work.  (Our car
is 20 years old, so we figure it’s doing well if all the mandatory
parts are functioning.)  Luckily, we had two thin fire bricks on
hand, so I put them in the toaster oven on high for an hour before we left, then
wrapped the hot bricks in an old t-shirt so they covered two-thirds of
the bottom of our box.  The bricks were too hot at first, so the
chicks sat off to the side in the unbricked area, but by the time we’d
swapped chicks (and spent an hour shopping in the big city), Sarah’s
chicks were quite happy to nap on the warm t-shirt all the way home.



All-told, our trip took
about 5.5 hours, and the chicks didn’t seem to be getting cold at
all.  Granted, they were already a week old — younger chicks
might have gotten distressed sooner — and the car was at room
temperature.  Still, hot bricks do seem to be a long-lasting and
viable brooder backup for power outage situations.  Much better
than the hand
warmers we used last
time the power went out while we had chicks in the brooder!

Although I wrote about
viability, hatchability, and survivability as scientific ways of
measuring success in Permaculture
Chicken: Incubation Handbook, I also use a simpler
method.  How soon do the chicks hop up on top of the ecoglow
brooder? 
(Usually, this occurs around day two, but I saw the first chicks
perched after 24 hours this time around.)  And how fast do the
chicks grow out of their living quarters?

Five days after the
first chicks hatched (and two days after the
runt popped out of
its shell), the rubbermaid-bin brooder was clearly overcrowded. 
Despite adding fresh leaves to the bottom, it was also starting to
smell.  Time to get those chicks outdoors!

In the process, I did my
best to pull out six girls to swap with a friend.  The
theory is that even at this tender age, you can guess the
sex of chicks based
on leg, comb, and overall size (larger for boys) and wing feathering
(more for girls).  I’ll let you know in a few months whether my
guess was better than the 50/50 mix you’d get by chance.

As seems to be usual, I
had to place the chicks under the brooder one by one for the first
couple of nights, but then they relearned the ropes and began to enjoy
their larger home.  Next stop — the real outdoors!