The Backyard Flock: Raising your chicks

Last week I wrote about bringing home day-old chicks. We left off at the point where we had them in their new home (a large secure box) and under a heat lamp at 95 degrees.

Keeping the chicks under the lamp for the next few weeks will be the hardest part of the operation. It might seem heartless to keep them exposed to the glaring light 24 hours-a-day. But, in the long run, you will have much healthier chickens for the effort. And, it is okay to take them out and play with them for short periods. This is something I highly recommend. Handling your chicks a lot when they are small will make for much calmer, easier to handle chickens when they are grown. This works fine with six chicks or so. If you have 30 or more, it might not be practical. If you have a warm sunny day, it is okay to take them out from under the lamp for awhile and let them play in the grass.

The Mt. Healthy Hatcheries Website (mthealthy.com) recommends keeping your chicks at 95 degrees for the first 10 days, decreasing the temperature 5 degrees each week thereafter. According to the Website, the ideal temperature for 6 week old chicks is 70 degrees. Lowering the temperature is accomplished by raising the lamp. I used a jury-rig arrangement of bungee cords suspended from the vertical blind track in my kitchen.

Keep them on the chick starter feed for the first couple months, and then switch them to grower feed.

Over the first few weeks your chicks will grow from cute little fuzz balls to awkward looking, skinny, long-legged adolescents. During this time, you should be getting ready for you next stages of housing, as they will soon outgrow their original quarters.

The logic behind purchasing a plastic large storage box with a secure top is that it can serve as both a first and second stage for housing. Around the same time your chicks are ready to come out from under the heat lamp, they will be probably be able to hop out of the box. And, assuming that it is warm enough, they will also be ready to be moved outside. So, on a warm sunny day while they are playing in the grass, using a box-cutter, cut a door into one of the sides of the box and drill an arrangement of small air holes near the top of both sides. The door cut should be about 8-10” square at the bottom of the box. Secure the cut out square of plastic at the bottom cut with duct tape. With the top locked on, this will serve as an outdoor coop. You can secure the door at night with more duct tape around all the edges. All you need to do is provide a fenced in area so when you let them out during the day, they will have a safe place to be outside. I recommend covering the top of their mini chicken run with chicken wire, not only to keep them in, but to keep predators out. By taping up the door, the box can be used again for future runs of chicks.

If you do not already have a flock, the next stage of housing can be directly into a coop. But if you have a flock of older chickens, you will need to wait until your young ones are big enough to be merged with the existing flock. In that case, you will need to add an intermediate housing stage, something bigger, but not expensive or elaborate, as it will not be used for more than just a few weeks. For this stage, I bought a large plastic doghouse and fashioned a door on it. When I don’t have chicks living in it, I use it to store a bale of straw near the chicken run. It has turned out to be very handy.

The final stage will be a permanent chicken coop, the design of which is up to you. I constructed a 4’x4’ box with a slight slope in the roof, doors and windows, and a roost. In a future article, I will give you details on how to build such a coop and how to construct a safe chicken run.

Next week: Merging your pullets with the flock