Author: Anna & Mark

A
week and a half after our newest
chick hatched, I’m
starting to see the tremendous advantage of letting a broody hen do all
the work.  After just a couple of days in the nest, our hen
decided it was time to start foraging lessons.  She and the chick
hopped down to the ground and went to work — Mama Hen scratched up a
worm and looked excited, broke it into pieces, and did everything she
could to get that worm into her offspring’s mouth.  She even broke
the chick feed into tiny pieces to expedite our chick’s early meals.



The
mother hen also taught me that chicks can be active from week
one.  Although the chick begged for a warm-up session under the
hen’s belly every few minutes at first, by now it’s trotting around the
chicken pasture without a care in the world.  Granted, the chick
does stay close to its mother’s side, and I don’t worry about it
straying despite the fact that it can easily slip through the chicken
wire and out of the pasture.  (Speaking of which, if you don’t
read our homestead blog, you might like to read the tale of how
we moved the chick onto pasture — it was quite an
adventure!)

Tuesday evening, I went
to check on the chick and noticed its mother perched up on the roost
for the first time since the hatching.  Where was the little
chick?  Surely it wasn’t old enough to spend the night
alone?  I walked closer, and a wee head poked out between the
feathers on the hen’s underbelly.  Somehow the mother got her
chick two feet off the ground before it was two weeks old!  This
chick is so precocious compared to our brooder-raised chicks, there’s
no comparison.

When you bring a new set of
chickens home, or move a flock to a new coop, it’s important to take a
little extra time to watch them going to bed.  The move was
probably a bit traumatic for both you and your flock, and chances are
you’d like to turn in early, but it’s a lot easier to get chickens into
the habit of roosting in their coop if they don’t spend their first
night perching in a bush.



Later, having chickens
in the coop at night will keep them warm, dry, and safe from
predators.  If they’ve accepted the coop as home base, your hens
will be more likely to lay eggs where you can find them, and it’ll make
everyone less likely to fly over fences and wander away.  Night is
also the best time to snag chickens who are going in the pot, and if
you can grab
them right off a perch in the coop, that duty will go much more
smoothly too.



So we took the time to herd
our month old chicks into their coop the first night, then watched them
the next evening to ensure the youngsters went inside on their
own.  A few chicks thought it might be more fun to perch outside,
but once a critical mass accumulated inside the coop, even those
mavericks went in.



Mark suspects that the
issue we’ve had with getting chicks to go in the coop during their
first few nights is due to the fact that it gets dark inside early and
chickens don’t like walking inside if they can’t see.  A carefully
placed window or two might make next year’s night training sessions
easier.