- May 18, 2010
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As most of us in the US can remember, 11 September 2001 was a transformative day and in the early hours of the tragedy actions were taken rather quickly. One of those actions was to ground all civilian air traffic. One of those grounded planes was a KAL 747 air freighter carrying approximately 7,500 day old chicks bound for Korea, a large batch of now homeless fuzzies without great prospects, nobody knew how long it would be until air traffic moved again and by then the fuzzies would be well past their "best by" date, lacking any care, food or water. The decision was made to humanely gas the entire brood unless someone had a better idea. In stepped the owner of a local commercial hatchery who rushed to the rescue, making many trips to ferry the entire crop of chicks to his facility in Wasilla (the same place as the famous Sarah Palin interview with the turkeys going into the killing cone in the background) and from there he managed to get the local fish wrapper to run a story offering up the chicks to somebody, anybody, for $.25 each. We were hosting an exchange student from Germany at the time, who decided that we should adopt some of these chicks...I figured what could possibly go wrong? They are just chickens, right?
We pull up to the Triple D and we could hear them before we even got out of the car. Sara was concerned that he might run out of chicks, not likely. There were pallets of chicks, all cheeping their hearts out in the shipping cartons, with the owner eager to rehome them as he hadn't anticipated getting 7.5K chicks so late in the season-September is late fall or early winter here, entirely the wrong season to start chicks and he was caught flat footed trying to feed them. There were white chicks and brown chicks. He told us that the white chicks were hens and the brown ones were roosters, so we picked up 17 "hens" and 3 "roosters" and scuttled home with our cardboard shipping box of little peepers.
We still had a waterer and a feeder from our last batch of birds that we thoughtfully raised for the entertainment of the local raptor population, water was easy to come by but food was a tougher problem. Nobody local was ready for the invasion of wayward chickens, so the birds learned early on to live on regular chicken feed as the proper crumbles were hard to source. We did quite well, IIRC we only lost 1 bird which for us is pretty average, we always get at least one Darwin Award winner in every batch. Out hopes were quite high for those fresh tasty eggs,, we had a lot of hens, but one learns not to count those eggs before the hens hand them over, especially when those hens start to crow.....
More later. Cuz I'm a stinker.
We pull up to the Triple D and we could hear them before we even got out of the car. Sara was concerned that he might run out of chicks, not likely. There were pallets of chicks, all cheeping their hearts out in the shipping cartons, with the owner eager to rehome them as he hadn't anticipated getting 7.5K chicks so late in the season-September is late fall or early winter here, entirely the wrong season to start chicks and he was caught flat footed trying to feed them. There were white chicks and brown chicks. He told us that the white chicks were hens and the brown ones were roosters, so we picked up 17 "hens" and 3 "roosters" and scuttled home with our cardboard shipping box of little peepers.
We still had a waterer and a feeder from our last batch of birds that we thoughtfully raised for the entertainment of the local raptor population, water was easy to come by but food was a tougher problem. Nobody local was ready for the invasion of wayward chickens, so the birds learned early on to live on regular chicken feed as the proper crumbles were hard to source. We did quite well, IIRC we only lost 1 bird which for us is pretty average, we always get at least one Darwin Award winner in every batch. Out hopes were quite high for those fresh tasty eggs,, we had a lot of hens, but one learns not to count those eggs before the hens hand them over, especially when those hens start to crow.....
More later. Cuz I'm a stinker.
