- Jan 28, 2011
- 25
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Greetings,
Been ghosting this website ever since I got engaged to my wife (about 7 months ago) and I convinced her to get chickens instead of a dog.
I'm a PhD student at Cornell University in Community Nutrition. In my spare time (heh...) I built a coop that borrowed heavily both from pictures off of this website's amazing coop section and from the architectural theory of "keep adding nails until it sinks into the ground".
We ordered 30 chicks from McMurray 7 months ago to arrive last Monday (although retrospectively I would have done things very differently and ordered eggs off of this website) and while my post office manager said that they would probably have someone stationed on Sunday to let me get them, they were incorrect and my introduction to chicken raising began with five dead, fifteen near-dead, and 10 healthy but irritable two day old chickens on Monday Morning at 4am when I picked them up. Final count was thirteen who didn't survive, so given the circumstances, saving seven of the ones my wife thought were past hope was about the best I could do. Welcome to the joys of chicken-hood?
I suspect I'm mostly going to be a bit of a lurker on account of job and pregnant wife restraints, but I thought I should jump in and retroactively thank most of you for all of the things you have written that made my coop building and chicken raising far less fatal and far more streamlined than it could have been.
Dave
Been ghosting this website ever since I got engaged to my wife (about 7 months ago) and I convinced her to get chickens instead of a dog.
I'm a PhD student at Cornell University in Community Nutrition. In my spare time (heh...) I built a coop that borrowed heavily both from pictures off of this website's amazing coop section and from the architectural theory of "keep adding nails until it sinks into the ground".
We ordered 30 chicks from McMurray 7 months ago to arrive last Monday (although retrospectively I would have done things very differently and ordered eggs off of this website) and while my post office manager said that they would probably have someone stationed on Sunday to let me get them, they were incorrect and my introduction to chicken raising began with five dead, fifteen near-dead, and 10 healthy but irritable two day old chickens on Monday Morning at 4am when I picked them up. Final count was thirteen who didn't survive, so given the circumstances, saving seven of the ones my wife thought were past hope was about the best I could do. Welcome to the joys of chicken-hood?
I suspect I'm mostly going to be a bit of a lurker on account of job and pregnant wife restraints, but I thought I should jump in and retroactively thank most of you for all of the things you have written that made my coop building and chicken raising far less fatal and far more streamlined than it could have been.
Dave
