Grannieannie’s Chookblog

http://grannieannie.allotment.org.uk/

Well, would you believe the chicks are actually 4 weeks old now!  The transformation is remarkable.  They are no longer chicks, but little chickens.  My friend came over to see them on Thursday.  “Oh,” she said “I was expecting to see little yellow things!”  “They were for about 2 days” said hubby, “but then they started to get their little white wings.”  I read in an old smallholder magazine that once past the 4 week stage, they don’t call them chicks now, they are growers, or pullets, so I don’t have any little yellow fluffy chicks anymore!  Well, not until this lot are grown and sold (hopefully!!) 

My brother phoned me this morning to say there was a 10×8 shed on freecycle, so I’ve emailed the lady to see if she will let us have it.  Hubby has started to extend the big henhouse by another 16ft, but he hurt his leg last week and has to keep stopping for a rest.  So the shed will be 34ft x 6ft, but still won’t be big enough for the 300 when they are bigger.  Here’s hoping that lady lets me have her shed.  Then they may just be big enough!  Especially as I want to put 12 of them in with my new POL’s so I’ll have 24 layers.

When I put the wardrobe in the shed to use as another brooder, I’d put some ground cover stuff (terram) down to put their shavings on to help keep them warm, and I made sure that there were no frayed edges for the chicks to get hold of.  Well, just shows you what they get up to.  I went out to see them yesterday, and one was walking around with a long strand of terram hanging out of its mouth.  I tried to get hold of it to pull it out, but the chick moved away.  I finally caught the strand and gently pulled it, but the chick had a tight hold on it and wouldn’t let go.  So I kept pulling gently, and the strand started to come out of its mouth, but to my horror, the chick had swallowed about a foot of this strand, its a wonder she didn’t die!  silly chick.  I don’t know where it came from, as I can’t see any loose bits around on the floor of the brooder!

I’m so glad we got the larger drinkers, as now I can hang them up, the water stays a bit cleaner, instead of being choked up with shavings and chick poo! 

I weighed some of them on Friday, their 4 week birthday, and apart from a couple which are slightly smaller, most of them weighed between 250 and 350 gms.  The ideal is 275 to 310, so they are doing fine.  Still don’t stop eating though!  They’ve got through 100kgs of chick crumbs since last Saturday!

I should be able to start putting them on growers pellets now, but there are still several bags of chick crumb left, so I think I will wait until next week, then start to mix the 2 feeds together to wean them over gradually.

Well chick crumbs actually, but doesn’t quite have the same ring to it does it? lol

Decided to clean the chicks out today, as although their ‘deep litter’ looked okay, it was smelling a bit of ammonia, which was a bit strange, as it looked dry, usually only starts to smell of ammonia when it gets damp.  So, took all the drinkers and feeders out.  We had to buy them some new feeders, as they are getting too tall now for the chick trough feeders we bought when they were tiny.  These ones are made from plastic, which OH said he’s never liked, but they arrived yesterday, and he is very impressed.  They are so much lighter than the galvanised ones we use for the big chooks, and will be much easier to clean.  We also bought 3 new plastic drinkers for the chooks in the wardrobe brooder and cold frame hospital!  The small ones we bought initially, we had to stand on blocks of wood as they don’t hang, but the chicks throw up so much of their shavings, that by morning, they can’t get any water out as the drinkers are choked with shavings and poo!  At least the new ones hang up, and I only need to give them their fresh water twice a day instead of about 4 times!

So I got into the brooder shed, with my small shovel, and very gently and carefully started to get the old shavings off the floor.  You’d think I was trying to kill them all!  The noise they were making, and as I was working my way around the shed, the silly chicks wouldn’t move around to get out of my way, they just bunched up together, about 4 high!  I could hear the squeals of panic from the ones at the bottom of the pile, so I had to keep stopping what I was doing to lift the top 3 layers of chicks off, and pick the others up as they were just laying there!!!  Once they stood up though, they realised they were actually still alive, and ran off with the rest!

Once it was all nice and clean, I put the clean shavings in and replaced all the feeders and drinkers.  Then they all went wild, dustbathing in the new shavings!!  After I put the clean shavings in the smaller shed, I put a feed trough back in as 1 big feeder wasn’t enough for all 75 chicks, but when I went back a bit later to see how they were, they had covered it in shavings.  You couldn’t even see it!!

The new feeders hold 12kg of chick crumbs, plus the chicks in the big shed have 2 feed troughs as well, and after only one day, it was almost empty!  They can eat for England these chicks!  But when I was cleaning them out, its surprising how much chick crumb they waste, but you can’t re-use it as its covered in poo and shavings.  No wonder they are costing so much to feed!

Whenever I open the shed doors, there are always up to 10 chicks sitting on the hardboard sides of the brooder, which are 2ft high!  And when they have a mad few minutes exercise, they fly all over the place, and can easily get higher than 2ft!

At nearly 4 weeks of age, they have nearly lost their yellow down now, and are almost all white, and you can see their tiny combs appearing.  I’ll take another photo of them on Friday when they are 4 weeks old.

Well, the fat little chicks are now 3 weeks old, well 23 days to be exact!  And they look HUGE!  I was a bit late in weighing them.  Should have done it Friday on their 3 week birthday!! lol .  They were over their ideal weights for the past 2 weeks, but today they are spot on! 

 The record sheet says they should be between 190 and 210 gms, and all the ones I weighed are exactly that.  The majority being dead on 200gms!  They have lovely white wing feathers and tail feathers now (unless someone pecks the tails off, which they are still doing a bit, but not as bad as before!!!)  and today I noticed that most of them have white downy bits on their heads too.  I hang their lettuces onto garden canes jammed from one side of the shed to the other, and although the canes are over 2ft from the ground, they are using them as perches, but once you get 10 200gm chicks on a cane, it bends so much they all fall off!!!!!  Everytime I open the shed door, the canes are on the floor!  I don’t want to hang too much from the ceiling in case it collapses!

In about 2 weeks time, they will outgrow their brooder sheds, so we will have to move them and now there are 297 instead of the 125 I was going to have, they will have to go into the big shed where I have my ex battery hens.  Therefore sadly, I am re-homing the ex batts.  I advertised on freecycle, hoping that I wouldn’t get someone who was going to try to eat them, as they haven’t any meat on them.  Luckily I have been contacted by some lovely ladies.  One came on Friday and collected 8 of them.  She also keeps ex battery hens plus 4 pure breeds, and the girls are settling down nicely, apart from one who was quite thin when we caught her, but Jax said she will be okay with a bit more TLC!

Then another lady is coming tomorrow for 20 or so.  She has a farmhouse where they do holidays for people with disabilities etc and keeps other ducks and rabbits.  So they will have loads of room to wander with her too!

 Then hubby has to extend the big house to accomodate all the chicks.  That’ll be interesting!  Well, I’d better go and tuck them up for the night.  Will add more news on Wednesday!

On Monday, I went out to the bigger of the brooder sheds, and when I opened the door, there was what looked like bits of red paper lying on the floor.  I was puzzled for a second,
then realised, it wasn’t paper, it was the bits of the infra red lightbulb I had in there!

What had happened, was when hubby re-built the shed for the chicks, to hold the lamp up safely, he put a bolt up through the roof and bolted down each side of the wood and new roof felt.  “Will that be okay?” I asked, “you’ve just made a hole in the new felt!”  “Oh that’ll be okay” he said,
I’ve made it nice and tight.  Well, it had been raining that morning, and you know what water’s like, gets anywhere.  It was only drips, but it had gone under the washer, through the roof, down the chain onto the lamp shade, and trickled onto the infra red which exploded!

Well, I was just going to put my leg over the 2ft hardboard circle that the chicks live inside, and there were 3 dead chicks right by my foot.  There must have been such a panic when the light exploded, that they got crushed!
I was soooo upset on Monday.  I couldn’t concentrate for 2 days!  I cleaned it all up, and unhooked the lamp from under the bolt and put it on a hook further away from the water, then I put a dull emitter bulb in the holder.  The dull
emitters are better, because they are more energy efficient and supposedly don’t explode if water is flicked onto them, but they don’t provide the infra red light, just heat, so that’s why we had the infra reds in there.

Hubby’s re-done the bolt and put mastic all over it now, but I’m still using the hook I put in.  It is only screwed into the wood, and doesn’t go out the other side!

I’m surprised I didn’t lose all of the chicks to heart attacks!

Washed all the chicks water bells this morning (why do they insist on pooing on top of them??)  but as our only outside tap is near the back door to the house, I do them in a bucket of vanodine solution.  Boy, was the water cold out there!!!!  Suppose I could boil a kettle of water first!!! lol

I haven’t got any lettuces in the garden at the moment, so I’d been buying them and hanging them up to try to stop the chicks getting bored, but it was costing a bit, so today I hung up a couple of CD’s.  Hubby said his friend Don used to do that with his turkey poults (mind you, Don did have about 25,000 turkeys!!!) to stop them getting bored and fighting. 

Must say, the chicks weren’t impressed, but hubby said I hung them too high, they need to be low enough that they can peck the CD’s which makes them flap around.  Perhaps it hypnotizes them (watching this CD will make you very friendly towards your fellow chicks!!!!!!) lol.

So tomorrow, I will re-hang the CD’s a bit lower down and see if that helps keep them occupied!

 Well, it doesn’t seem possible that the chicks are now 2 weeks old.  I weighed some of them yesterday.  According to my record sheets, they should weigh between 125 and 135 gms.  A few are a bit smaller, 120gms, but the majority weigh up to 150gms!  Greedy little things! But according to the hatchery, I still have to feed them ad lib.  They have eaten an amazing 80 kgs of chick crumbs in the past 2 weeks!

I’m still giving them their lettuces or sweetcorn each day.  It helps keep them occupied.  I have a garden cane stretched across the brooder shed at a height of 2ft with the lettuce hanging down from it. Well, they love jumping up and catching bits of lettuce, but several of them also fly up and perch on the cane!  Can you believe, so small still, but they can fly to a height of 2ft and more! 

They look funny trying to dust bathe in the shavings and straw!  I was watching one of them tonight, and she was nearly covered in shavings, so much so, that the other chicks were just walking over the top of her as if they couldn’t see her!

The brooder sheds look like something out of Great Expectations!  The chicks produce an amazing amount of white dust, and it sticks to the cobwebs on the walls and ceilings of the sheds!

At least, I can turn the heat down a touch now, goodness knows what the next electricity bill will be!!!!

Still, its 10.30pm now, so I’d better go and check on them all to make sure they are warm enough and still have plenty of food and water in their sheds.

Well, after all the panic of the past week, it has gone almost unnoticed that one of the new point of lay hens produced her first egg!

We thought they would never lay any!  If the information I was given was correct, they are now 23 weeks old and should have started before now!  Anyway, its now Saturday 22nd September, and we have had 4 eggs off of one of the new girls, and another came into lay today!  Just another 10 to go, and that’s another dozen eggs a day!

Also, I think the old ex battery girls were in a moult for the past few months, because at the moment I am getting between 6 and 11 eggs a day, as opposed to 4-6 for the past few months.

When we first got the ex batts, they were laying quite well, in fact 3 were laid in the car bringing them home!  And as it was more than we needed for ourselves, I decided to put a notice up out the front selling my eggs.  I waited for several weeks, giving eggs to friends and family, then I started to get customers!  I was only sellng them for £1.20p a dozen, because as they are from ex battery hens, the eggs don’t look as uniform as the supermarket eggs.  you get different colours, different sizes and shapes.  Wrinkled shells etc.  But my customers didn’t mind.  They felt they were helping to do their bit too, to help these poor old ex battery hens lead a normal life again!  I don’t make a profit on my eggs at the moment, as all monies that I get for the eggs, goes towards the hens feed and shavings etc, but its been nice that they had been self sufficient, all this time until they started to moult!

I had to cover my sign up a couple of months ago, because I just wasn’t getting enough eggs to sell to anyone!  One or two people still came to the door to ask if there were any eggs spare, and if there were, then I’d let them have them.  Hopefully I can soon uncover my sign again once the new girls start to lay in earnest!!

 Mind you, I’ll have to put the price up to £1.40 or something.  But most people around here charge £2.00 a dozen!  Feed prices have gone through the roof.  I am paying £1 more per bag than I was in April!  I had a customer today, who said everyone else around is putting up their prices because of the price of feed.  His son works for a pet food company as an accountant, and stuff like wheat has gone up from just over £40 a tonne, to about £120!!!  That’s bad, and I can only see it getting worse with all the rain and other bad weather we’ve had this year!

On Tuesday, I thought I had to do something quick, perhaps if I had another small 6 x 4 shed, I could separate the stressed chicks into 2 lots, but the only other shed was hubbys workshop, which is much larger, and full of his tools and workbenches etc.

So I thought perhaps if we got some more hardboard, we could make a big circle like I’d seen in the magazines and keep half of them in there, but hardboard isn’t very heavy so it would need weghing down or something.

You can tell I’m not very technically minded can’t you?? lol

So I was upstairs looking around, and I kept looking at the wardrobe in the spare bedroom!  I measured it, and it was 6ft tall, 4ft wide, and about 20 inches deep. Mmmmmm, interesting!  No, don’t be silly I kept telling myself, you can’t put chickens in a wardrobe!  But hubby had put them in the greenhouse, so was my idea any sillier?  And something HAD to be done!  Luckily hubby was out for a few hours, so I took the doors off, and the hardboard back. (Hardboard, another bonus!!!)  But I couldn’t get the centre panel off.  Its an old wardrobe and I couldn’t get the screws out!.  then I thought if I could only get it down the stairs before hubby gets home.  Well, although not really heavy, I couldn’t get it down the stairs on my own.  I managed to get it to the top, but didn’t want to risk it falling down the stairs with me possibly underneath it!  So I had to leave it there until hubby got home.  When he arrived, we took it out to his workshop, and laid it on its back.  He said to keep the centre panel in place, as it would help keep a bit of the emergency brooder dark for the chicks.  He cut 4 pieces of the hardboard and fitted them into the corners of the wardrobe so there would be no corners for the chicks to get crushed into, as when they go to sleep, they huddle together and we did lose a few to being crushed, even though there weren’t any corners in any of the brooders!

I then put one of the doors over the brooder at the back to act as a roof, and hubby fitted up another pygmy bulb and a dull emitter bulb for heat as we didn’t have any more infra red lamps.

In case the concrete floor was chilly, I put some ground cover membrane under the wardrobe and piled wood shavings in it, then left it to warm up a bit before putting the chicks in it.

At least with a larger area, and only 75 chicks, they’ve now got more room to run around and practise their flying!  I turned away to get them some chick crumbs, and when I looked round there was a chick sitting on the top of the wardrobe!  So I got some of my garden netting and covered the whole area to keep them in.  Its a very stiff netting, so they shouldn’t get caught up in it if they do fly upwards.  I weighed it down around the sides with some double ended hooks and pieces of wood going across the hooks as weights.

Wow, am I a genius or what?  I know, probably the ‘or what’!!!  But its working, they are happy, they love their corn on the cobs and lettuces strung up.  We still get the odd injury, but I can’t think of what else it can be!

Well, the second week in the brooders started well.  The chicks in the converted greenhouse seemed happy, temperatures were okay, so I thought all would be well.

Then on Sunday, hubby called me to say that there was blood on some of the chicks in the greenhouse!  When we looked, there were quite a few with blood at the base of their tails, and as we looked, other chicks were chasing them around, pecking at their tails, and in some cases their wings!

Oh my god, hubby panicked! I panicked, then I went and got a large cardboard box, one of the ones the removal companies give you, put some wood shavings in it and went into the greenhouse and picked up all the ones that were injured.

I’d got some purple spray that had been recommended to me for one of the old girls who had her vent pecked.  So I sprayed all the injured bits of the chicks.  We took the box in to the dining room.  Funnily enough, it didn’t seem to bother the chicks.  We didn’t know why it had happened.  I checked the temperature in the greenhouse, it was a little high, so we opened the vent a bit more, they had plenty to eat and drink.  So I went in and read through my old Smallholder magazines, and looked feather pecking up on the internet.  There seems to be a myriad of reasons why it happens, but over heating and stress seem the most common.  We kept the greenhouse cooler through Sunday, but we were still getting more injured chicks, until we had about 40 in these big boxes in the dining room!  I put a post on my favourite forum (see sites I like!!) as I knew there are quite a few good chook keepers on there.  One of the members answered and said that trying to convert the greenhouse wasn’t a good idea, as with all the glass (even though hubby had covered some of it in black plastic!) it was nigh on impossible to regulate the temperature properly and we should get them out quick!  they are over heating and getting very stressed.  He also suggested we hang  a lettuce and/or corn on the cobs in the brooders to help keep the chicks occupied.

The only other place we had was my small garden shed, but it is only 6 x 4, so not really big enough for 150 chicks!  Anyway, I cleared it all out, washed it and disinfected it and we waited for awhile to let it dry, luckily it was a nice warm day so didn’t take long.  Hubby went and bought some more hardboard to cut the corners off the area and we put the infra red lamp in there.  I also got one of the boxes the chicks came home in, cut the side down a bit and filled it with sieved dry soil from my polytunnel.  I put that in the new shed, with the food and water, and they loved it!  How chicks that young instinctively know how to dust bathe is amazing!  They also loved the lettuces! Jumping up to reach bits.  It certainly kept them busy!

Monday arrived, and we had more casualties!!!  I think the small shed was just too small, so I spent all day trying to think of where else they could go!  We had taken my cold frame that hubby had made me into the garage for the injured chicks.  It was very warm in there with a pygmy lightbulb painted red, so they were out of the dining room, but during the course of monday, I still had loads of injuries.  I had to get them into somewhere bigger quick!

Strangely enough, the chicks in the original shed were fine, no cannibal tendencies at all, so I thought perhaps it was the stress of moving that caused the problem.

Well, the chicks are 1 week old today! And we transferred half of them to their new home in the converted greenhouse! I tried weighing them, as at one week old, they are supposed to be between 60 and 68 gms, but the ones I managed to weigh (fidgety little things what they are!) were between 65 and 86 gms!!!

This past week they have eaten between them nearly 40kgs of chick crumb! I called the hatchery to check that we are supposed to be feeding them ad lib, yes they said, give them as much as they want!!!!

When my friend John works out how I can put some pics on here, as I’m a bit thick where this sort of stuff is concerned! I’ll show you the photos I took. Their little wings are so much bigger now, and when we got back from the feed supplier with their latest bag of chick crumbs, (half a ton arriving next Tuesday!) one chick was sitting on top of the water bell which is over a foot high!!!!

We also bought 12 Bovans Goldline POL’s 3 weeks ago. They are a cross between a Rhode Island Red Cockerel and a Light Sussex Hen, so when I called the hatchery, I also mentioned the Amberlinks. What are they a cross of I asked? Oh they are the same, just the other way round. So the white Amberlinks are a cross of a Light Sussex Cockerel and a Rhode Island Red Hen.

They are all sex linked, so you can tell as soon as they hatch whether they are hens or cockerels, which is very clever, but must put the old chickens sexer out of business!!!!

Still, I’m just going out to the garden to make sure they are all okay, especially the ones in the greenhouse, as its their first night in there.