Help w abandoned baby chicks

[vlapinta]

The term "lockdown" means when you are incubating eggs, about 2-3 days before the hatch date you stop turning eggs, increase humidity and you do not open the incubator at all until the chicks or ducklings are ready to go into the brooder. That is why it is called lockdown. With the abandoned chicken eggs we had no choice but to open the incubator because we had to still turn the duck eggs. I think we were lucky in that duck eggs need a higher humidity when incubating, so when we put the chicken eggs in it was where it needed to be for the hatch. I am also a newbie, but I have been reading and learning so much on this site. I am so happy I found it! We now have 3 adorable chicks and we are waiting for our call duck eggs to hatch on 3/31 or 4/1

Vicki

 

[vlapinta]

The chicks are 10 days old. They have more than doubled in size! I can't believe how fast they grow. We can bring them back to the farm when they are older, or we can keep them here till the weather gets colder again. We don't have a coop, so can we just let them free range in the fenced in yard? Any suggestions on what we can use at night? I have a shed I can put them in, will this work? I am not doing anything until they are able to come out of the brooder. We were going to bring them back to the farm, but we are really enjoying them. I am building a duck pen , but my husband would kill me if I ask him to also build a chicken coop, lol. I want to do whats best for them though, so if it means back to the farm than thats what we will do.
We read that chicks like crickets, so we got 10 really tiny ones and put them in the brooder. They were so afraid of the crickets it was comical. The they realized the crickets were food and they were happy!

Vicki