First chicks by mail - any advice?

[danceswithronin]

My suggestion (I just got mail order chicks last week) is to check their little butts every day for pasty butt. I check mine morning and night when I'm refilling the waterer. It's common in mail order chicks due to transport stress and can kill very quickly if it isn't attended to. I ran into this issue with two of my five day old chicks but once I added grit and a bit of hardboiled egg to their medicated feed and got them in a temperature controlled environment, it cleared up in a matter of days. Until it clears up it has to be monitored very carefully though, and any affected chicks have to have their butts cleaned manually so that they don't get a bowel impaction.

Read more about it here: http://pet-chicken.com/what-is-pasty-butt/

 

[ChickNanny13]

Caution: feather dusters look really cute, but can entangle chicks. (Sorry to be all "The Internet sez: everything will kill you!!!", but...)

As others have noted elsewhere , there are numerous tearful posts by new chicken owners who have woken up to find their chicks strangled in the long, rope-like ostrich feathers. Chicken feathers are more wide and flat, and of course, attached to an attentive mama hen.

The underside of a hen isn't very fluffy anyway, since she's plucked out lots of feathers to expose more bare skin for maximum heat transfer to her chicks.
Chicks in a broader will be fine if they are warm enough-- they can always snuggle up to each other if they want something fuzzy.

I hope your little peeps are doing well! Keep us posted!

Prior to reading that article I had used the feather duster only on two occasions and thankfully with no sad results. Think I'll go back to the stuffed animal with my MHP.

 

[Ladybird CA]

I didn’t know BYC sold chicks

 

[ChickNanny13]

Do they? I know there's a forum for selling ....

 

[aart]

I didn’t know BYC sold chicks

This forum doesn't, but I think there's a company call Backyard Chickens that sell or brokers them.

Do they? I know there's a forum for selling ....

Yes. https://www.backyardchickens.com/forums/#buy-sell-trade.67

 

[Ladybird CA]

I know there’s a buy n sell section but not sure if they sell chicks directly

 

[Ladybird CA]

Oh interesting

 

[Liv_loves_chickens]

When your chicks first arrive I would give them electrolytes in there water this is what we do and it works very well. You can find the packets in your local farm store.

 

[MyChickenShack]

My chickens turned 1 year old this June and they were mail order from Murry McMurry. We lost 2, I think, and one was a Faverolle...One thing I noticed is that since we did not have any others for them to model, they seemed to take longer to do things like learning to roost than say the little ones that hatched this year with a mama to teach them...Best of luck!

 

[Pipers chicks]

Awesome!!! I give my chicks sugar water for the first few days. 3 tbs of sugar to a quart of water. I guess it's like the Nutri drench.
Good luck!!!