Author: Anna & Mark

As I mentioned before, one of our chicks hatched with a foot problem.  The toes on one foot were curled into a fist that remained closed even when the chick started hopping around.

There are two potential causes of what’s known as “curled toe paralysis.” If toes on both of your chickens’ feet are curled up, chances are the bird is suffering from a riboflavin deficiency due to a malnourished mother hen.
The solution in that case is to provide a vitamin supplement to that
chick immediately, which in many cases will cause the toes to naturally
uncurl.

If your chick has curled toes on only one foot (meaning it probably injured itself in the egg) or if you provide vitamins and the toes don’t uncurl, you’ll need to splint the chick’s foot.  Splinting is best done as soon as you notice the problem — I waited until day 3, but think I would have seen even better results if I’d splinted on day 1.  Mark helped me by holding the chick still during the operation and I highly recommend you find a helper before trying the procedure as well.

I’ve seen various splint methods on the internet, but the one that worked for us was to use two pieces of 3M Transpore tape to sandwich the chick’s toes into a flat position.  Various people have had good luck with using bandaids and cardboard, but I didn’t think the bandaids were sticky enough, so I opted for the breathable but stickier Transpore.  The extra stickiness made it easy to uncurl one toe at a time, laying each one against the tape to stay in place while I worked on the next.

The first day we splinted the chick’s foot, we learned another lesson — make sure the tape covers every bit of his toes.  Our chick wasn’t pleased to have one foot turn into a flipper, so he pecked at the tape, which prompted his siblings to follow suit.  I had left the end of one toe exposed and that spot was soon slightly bloody.  Wrapping the tape all the way around the foot worked much better the next day.

We replaced the splint 24 hours later, at which point it was clear the toes were starting to uncurl but
weren’t there yet.  The second splint stayed on for two days, which seemed to be just long enough to make sure the chick was able to walk flat-footed rather than on a fist.  His toes are still slightly crooked, but the deformity doesn’t seem to slow him down — I have to sit and watch the brooder for five minutes before I can even pick him out.  I’m glad to have been able to save such an intrepid chick!

Just about every carnivore
likes to eat chickens, but chicks most often fall prey to only one —
rats.  Rats won’t harm an adult chicken, but chicks up to about
six weeks old are easy pickings, especially at night before they learn
to perch out of reach.  Sometimes, rats will drag the unlucky
chick away to eat it and you’ll only notice the problem when you count
heads, but you might also find a dead chick abandoned on the coop floor.



Success With Baby Chicks and Raising
Poultry on Pasture
both mentioned that rats are the biggest cause of chick losses for many
operations.  We never had a problem until we lost a quarter of our
chicks to rats during our first two hatches of 2011.  We let a
broody hen raise our third batch and she did a good job of keeping rats
at bay, but our last batch had to be motherless — how to protect them?



If you can’t find any other
way to get rid of rats, poison is supposed
to be a very effective solution.  This farmer killed 83,450 rats
in nine months (and won a new TV to reward his prowess.)  On the
other hand, although poison definitely works, I wouldn’t want to risk
killing our chickens, cats, or dog.



Another option is to
keep your chicks in the house as long as possible.  However, by
the time good foraging breeds are three weeks old, they’ve heartily
outgrown their brooder and want to hunt down bugs.  Mark went to
work chinking in all of the gaps in their coop, which helped a lot, but
I think the biggest reason our month old chicks
are all still alive is that I stopped making a stupid mistake —
leaving food out in the coop.



Rats are attracted to
chicken feed, not to chicks.  Sure, they’ll take those tender
morsels if the opportunity arises, but you won’t have rats in your coop
in the first place if they have nothing to eat when chicks aren’t
present.  I made the rookie mistake earlier this year of leaving
the chick feed unprotected in the coop — after all, chicks were too
small to break into the bag.  But once I sealed
the feed away in a metal trash can and spread the day’s ration
out on the ground in the pasture, there was nothing to attract rats to
the coop.  Within a few days, our chicks will have passed the six
week trouble period with no predation — maybe we’ll have 100%
survival this time around?