BREEDING FOR PRODUCTION...EGGS AND OR MEAT.

[cyborg]

I have a question for you fine folks. When you have a brooder full of chicks when many look alike, and you want to leg band them (zip ties), weigh them, or otherwise check on them, how do you get them out one at a time to check/weigh without completely terrorizing them all?

I have 23 right now, and they are a week and a half old. I am trying to get them banded with some numbered zip ties so I can track weights/growth curve (as well as note any health issues). I know about how to try not to startle them (not looming, not snatching, etc.), but in the end it didn't work very well (they are fast and get away easily) - no matter what I did they freaked out, especially as the number of un-banded ones began to dwindle and I had to target getting certain chicks. I still have 7 I need to band, but I decided to call it quits and give them a break.

How do you folks do this (get weights, etc., or even just get a chick out of the brooder to check on a specific chick's injury) without giving them all little heart attacks? Is there a trick to this that I'm missing? I hate stressing them out (or teaching them all to run form me)...

Any tips would be welcome.

- Ant Farm

I usually pull one out when they're sleeping. You will still scare them when you take one out, but they settle back down pretty fast when they're tired.

 

[Fire Ant Farm]

What breed of chickens do you have? Some like Penedesencas are just like that and you have to work with them. Others are very tame and calm.

Do this:

Get some dried meal worms and drop them in front of them. Tap the worms and make tsk noises or even chirps. Eventually the chicks will start eating out of your hands. When they do this, pick them up. They will get used to you and not be as scared.

Also, they are chickens so do not worry so much about scaring them. They will get over it--especially if you have a tasty treat for them.

Naked Necks and New Hampshires - they aren't really scaredy cat chicks, it's just that they can set up a group startle reaction and it's like a little flock and then they are all out of reach. Honestly, I suspect that some of it may be due to their waterer coming apart while I was changing it right before work on day 2 of life, soaking part of the brooder and leading me to have to do a sudden major bedding change (while shocking them with my language, which was probably not appropriate for the ears of baby chickens) - maybe they have PTSD?

These are intended for my small meat flock/NN-NH hybrid project - I will only keep about 7 or 8 of the best, and the rest will go to freezer camp once up to size/age. So I'm not really asking because I want to baby them or have them as pets (though I have no desire to upset an animal unnecessarily). It's more about the fact that if I freak them out, they will be harder to handle later to weigh or if injured, etc.

I hadn't thought about meal worms this early, but yeah, that's a good idea. I'll do that. (They've had sand since day 3 for both grit and dust bathing, so it should be ok). It's just that there are a few NHs that always run, and the brooder is so big that I can't get to some specific ones easily. (Even the little blind one is agile and gets around exceedingly well. She doesn't need to be banded - she has a big purple Sharpie mark on the back of her head because I needed to be able to find her easily right away to make sure to take her out if the others start picking at her. She's really tough so far, no help from me...)

I have some little friends to make...

I usually pull one out when they're sleeping. You will still scare them when you take one out, but they settle back down pretty fast when they're tired.

OMG, I can't believe I didn't think of that!!!! Duh! THANK you. (The challenge will be that they sleep in a big tangled chick pile, of course...)

- Ant Farm

 

[Beer can]

I usually pull one out when they're sleeping. You will still scare them when you take one out, but they settle back down pretty fast when they're tired.

And it's dark, much calmer, not even my leghorns spook.

 

[hellbender]

They will not have heart failure.

We have sections of shower wall material that is cut to fit right into the brooders and we gently squeese them into one end of the brooder. If we need to further confine them, we have smaller pieces to to pull them from one side to get them even more condensed.

We usually take then all out and put them into those extra large storage bins ...ours are mostly the blue ones from Walmart. We pick out one chick at a time...do what ever we plan to do with it and put it back into the brooder. They may act like the sky is falling but the little jackasses are far tougher than you seem to think. If one actually does a heart attack and dies, you are well rid of it before you put much money in it. We've been doing this for decades and haven't had ONE even have anything more than a minor fright. They do screech and you think they are ready to succumb but when they are put back into their brooder, they start eating, bumping and acting themselves within 3 to 5 minutes after the last bird is re-introduced.

EDIT: If you want to think about scaring them to death, just consider trying to catch them from a brooder with a net or chasing them all over hell's half acre with your hands.

When you have then 'corralled', they stay pretty much static and can be handled. By putting them all in a bin on bedding, they quiet down and are very easy to pull out, one at a time.

To my mind, it's common chicken sense.

 

[bnjrob]

I have a question for you fine folks. When you have a brooder full of chicks when many look alike, and you want to leg band them (zip ties), weigh them, or otherwise check on them, how do you get them out one at a time to check/weigh without completely terrorizing them all?

I have 23 right now, and they are a week and a half old. I am trying to get them banded with some numbered zip ties so I can track weights/growth curve (as well as note any health issues). I know about how to try not to startle them (not looming, not snatching, etc.), but in the end it didn't work very well (they are fast and get away easily) - no matter what I did they freaked out, especially as the number of un-banded ones began to dwindle and I had to target getting certain chicks. I still have 7 I need to band, but I decided to call it quits and give them a break.

How do you folks do this (get weights, etc., or even just get a chick out of the brooder to check on a specific chick's injury) without giving them all little heart attacks? Is there a trick to this that I'm missing? I hate stressing them out (or teaching them all to run form me)...

Any tips would be welcome.

- Ant Farm

That behavior drives me nuts! They are gonna think the sky is falling no matter what. Especially in a brooder when that big scary giant looms over them and that hand reaches down from the sky to pluck them out and take them who-knows-where. That's just the way most chickens are. They get into a mass panic mode and it will drive you crazy. Generally as they grow, their fear will decrease, although you can wind up with one or two easily frightened birds in a group that still cause mass panic even after they are adults. Unless they are sickly or have something wrong that you can't see, you aren't likely to kill them just because they are freaking out when you take them out to work with them. Sometimes doing it at night helps with the panic, but not always. It's just one of those things they have to get used to. They will still be likely to do it as adults unless you have time to play pet-chicken-keeper with each and every one of them to get them to just stand still while you pick them up. If you don't have time for that, once they are adults you will be either catching them with a net or leg hook to work with them, or you will be outside after dark so you can pick them up off their roost to work with them. Chicks can be bad about panicking and crushing each other so dividing them into smaller groups and rounding out corners in the container they are in, can help decrease crushing during a panic.

We only have one chicken, a 3 year old cock, that will stand next to us and let us pick him up without any fuss at all, but otherwise, all of our chickens have some degree of *ack don't touch me!* if we try to pick them up. We have so many birds that I don't have time to sit and play with them all the time to get them accustomed to just standing and waiting for us to hold them. But that's ok with us. We are raising farm birds, not pets. If they completely lose their sense of fear, they could become predator bait more easily. Most of our chickens will come up around us when we have buckets in our hands, they mill around and watch what we are doing as we refill things in their pens, but if we try to touch them, they shimmy out of the way. But that is what we want them to do - to give us space to work around them and not be all up in our faces, but still come to us when we have treats so we can round them up if we need to. We had one cock that was overly friendly as a youngster - he unfortunately suddenly changed and began attacking us for seemingly no reason and we had to butcher him. So I'd rather have the curious chicken but then they stand back and acknowledge that the human is the top of the food chain and give us a respectful distance when needed.

I made the mistake this year of getting guineas, and I put guinea keets with my newly hatched chicks - OMG the darn keets taught the chicks to freak out at every little thing. They were panicking worse than any bunch of chicks we've ever had. I do not plan on brooding keets and chicks together again, it was just too awful. Those guineas freak out at everything and they teach chicks bad habits.

 

[gjensen]

I have a question for you fine folks. When you have a brooder full of chicks when many look alike, and you want to leg band them (zip ties), weigh them, or otherwise check on them, how do you get them out one at a time to check/weigh without completely terrorizing them all?

I have 23 right now, and they are a week and a half old. I am trying to get them banded with some numbered zip ties so I can track weights/growth curve (as well as note any health issues). I know about how to try not to startle them (not looming, not snatching, etc.), but in the end it didn't work very well (they are fast and get away easily) - no matter what I did they freaked out, especially as the number of un-banded ones began to dwindle and I had to target getting certain chicks. I still have 7 I need to band, but I decided to call it quits and give them a break.

How do you folks do this (get weights, etc., or even just get a chick out of the brooder to check on a specific chick's injury) without giving them all little heart attacks? Is there a trick to this that I'm missing? I hate stressing them out (or teaching them all to run form me)...

Any tips would be welcome.

- Ant Farm

That is a good question, but one you will have to sort out for yourself. Much has to do with your set up, your birds, and yourself.

Just work at an intentional pace, and get it done. You will figure out how you prefer to do it in a few generations. Just remember the three factors. The set up, the birds, and you. Some bird are easier to work with than others, some set ups are better than others, and some owners are more intentional than others.

 

[Dead Rabbit]

If one wants to seriously breed fowl and/or raise young fowl, it's best to have a true brooder set up. One where they are well contained, temperatures are easily monitored and adjusted, and cleaning is a minor and easily accomplished chore, only needed once the brooder has been emptied. Preparing for the next batch. This does not include the dropping pan that must be emptied every few days depending on age and population density.
The brooder box must also make it easy to add to and take away biddies when the time comes. The best brooder boxes are the commercial metal ones that many companies sell. A quick Google gives you many options. But all of them have a common denominator of being extremely pricey. Still if I was going to raise a lot of fowl each year it's an investment I would make. Instead I opted for building one that is similar in design.
Having a brooder like this makes removal of young birds easy. All one has to do is cut off the heat bulbs and the box comes totally dark. Chickens rarely scatter in the dark. So with this method. Remove the biddies one at a time. Do your thing and place the banded one in another dark container till you have banded all them. Then replace the whole lot of them back into the broader box. Turn back on the lights .
This method can be used and modified regardless of the set up. But a true brooder box makes it a little easier.

IMO scaring young biddies isn't a good thing. Of course it's to be expected to a degree. They are chickens after all. With a huge fight or flee instinct created into them. 99.9% of the time fleeing outweighs the flight instinct but still, the less commotion the better.

 

[Fire Ant Farm]

That is a good question, but one you will have to sort out for yourself. Much has to do with your set up, your birds, and yourself.

Just work at an intentional pace, and get it done. You will figure out how you prefer to do it in a few generations. Just remember the three factors. The set up, the birds, and you. Some bird are easier to work with than others, some set ups are better than others, and some owners are more intentional than others.

Thanks everyone for the input. It is indeed specific to my setup, which is an excellent point - I'm happy with the set up, but if all goes well, this will probably/hopefully be the last time I ever brood this many chicks at once (replacing chicks in smaller batches whether hatched here or purchased). I was just so frustrated last night, so it helped to vent and ask for input from chicken people.

I had to change out their brooder bedding this morning (poopy!), so I divided their brooder area in half with cardboard dividers (to clean out one half at a time), which is a system that has worked well for me as they stay calmer during the process and I can do what I need to do to clean. Then I realized that this was the perfect opportunity to take care of the weighing and examination. So after I cleaned and refreshed that first side of the brooder and replaced food/water and their sand bath (favorite thing in the brooder!), I systematically took the chicks out of the other half one at a time, banded if not already banded, weighed, examined for any injury or issues, guessed at gender based on feathering (always a fun game) and then put them in the new area. They weren't delighted, but they were less freaked out than last night, possibly because they had less area of brooder to run around in to get away from me (maybe not getting so worked up?). Also, I think after last night they are maybe starting to realize I'm not going to kill them.

So all are now marked and weighed, no injuries/issues identified, but I found two New Hampshire chicks that are not growing well and are significantly under the weight of the others (were below the radar, lost in the sea of yellow fuzz). They are all in there now acting like it never happened, napping in the filtered morning sun that comes through the window or scratching or eating happily. And although I realize that weight at one week isn't necessarily totally predictive, it is instructive - I got the New Hampshires in part to "add size" to the Naked Necks if needed (apparently they can be either big or small depending on the source - S&G is "supposed" to have the biggest Naked Necks, sold as broilers, but I couldn't possibly cope with their 100 chick minimum...). But, while most of the New Hampshires are good sized, the Naked Necks are equal or bigger. I will watch their growth curves, but depending on what I find, I may end up adjusting my project/plan and just keep the Naked Necks together as a breeding group and treat any keeper New Hampshire pullets I like as layers.

- Ant Farm

 

[dfr1973]

... I found two New Hampshire chicks that are not growing well and are significantly under the weight of the others (were below the radar, lost in the sea of yellow fuzz). ... And although I realize that weight at one week isn't necessarily totally predictive, it is instructive - I got the New Hampshires in part to "add size" to the Naked Necks if needed ... But, while most of the New Hampshires are good sized, the Naked Necks are equal or bigger. I will watch their growth curves, but depending on what I find, I may end up adjusting my project/plan and just keep the Naked Necks together as a breeding group and treat any keeper New Hampshire pullets I like as layers.

- Ant Farm

Another thing to remember is for a few generations, you will have more than enough genetic variety to account for these kinds of differences in size and coloring. If you have a very specific picture in your mind of what you want to breed, then each year you'll keep only the ones closest to that ideal until your hatches are more uniform-looking. This is especially true when crossing two different phenotypes, either breeds or varieties or very different lines.

As an example, I am crossing hatchery stock gold-laced Wyandottes with black phase blue-laced red Wyandottes from a breeder near me, so with both a variety cross and a big-difference line cross, I know I'll have quite the variety of results for at least three generations, probably five, and this is with a very clear picture of my goal.

 

[DesertChic]

I have a question for you fine folks. When you have a brooder full of chicks when many look alike, and you want to leg band them (zip ties), weigh them, or otherwise check on them, how do you get them out one at a time to check/weigh without completely terrorizing them all?

I have 23 right now, and they are a week and a half old. I am trying to get them banded with some numbered zip ties so I can track weights/growth curve (as well as note any health issues). I know about how to try not to startle them (not looming, not snatching, etc.), but in the end it didn't work very well (they are fast and get away easily) - no matter what I did they freaked out, especially as the number of un-banded ones began to dwindle and I had to target getting certain chicks. I still have 7 I need to band, but I decided to call it quits and give them a break.

How do you folks do this (get weights, etc., or even just get a chick out of the brooder to check on a specific chick's injury) without giving them all little heart attacks? Is there a trick to this that I'm missing? I hate stressing them out (or teaching them all to run form me)...

Any tips would be welcome.

- Ant Farm

My only recommendation is to handle them a lot so their used to you, and throughout the day put your hand in the brooder, moving it slowly to touch various chicks. I only had one hatch of birds there were super flighty and no matter what I did they would freak out. The rest of my hatches all gave me chicks that would eventually run TO my hand and sometimes jump on to be lifted out and petted. The breed matters a lot though. Some birds are just more nervous.