Shipping chicks

[jpalmatier83]

If your sustained temps have been significantly over 100f desi probably has a point.

I still believe that climate control in the transportation vehicles offsets the temps. and quickly collecting the birds from the post office is the major factor.

One could say the opposite of where I am in northern Michigan. Temp is too cold. They have no heat lamp. But the vehicles are still heated and if you get them and take them home quickly you should be fine. I haven’t had a problem with mailed birds in march/April either.

This is all assuming a normal delivery where the birds aren’t lost in transit or delayed. Which can happen any time of the year.

 

[Ridgerunner]

I still believe that climate control in the transportation vehicles offsets the temps.

If everyone follows established procedures I'd agree with you. And most people do from hatchery to post office to airlines. That's why the vast majority of chicks arrive alive and healthy. But you are dealing with human beings. Some just flat out make mistakes. Humans are good at that. Some people just don't worry about following procedures. We've all met those. My brother is a retired rural route carrier. He's said most do it right but occasionally you get someone that sees a fragile stamp and has to toss it. Those types usually don't last long. You can get airline employees like that too.

For colder weather hatcheries either have a minimum order so they have enough chicks to put out enough heat to keep them alive or you pay to pack some type of heating with them. In cold weather some hatcheries add packing peanuts for free to keep temperatures up. These are usually excess males that people don't order. But they can't add anything that takes heat away. In normal weather the chicks can usually handle it if somebody leaves them on an exposed loading dock or somewhere else they are not supposed to be for a while but in extreme cold or extreme heat they can soon be in trouble.

I'm not talking about when everything goes the way it is designed to, even in extreme weather it usually does. But when something does go wrong in severe weather the risks are higher.

For what it is worth, when I was in Arkansas I sometimes ordered chicks in February that left the hatchery and arrived when the outside temperatures were below freezing. They all arrived alive. All along the supply chain everybody did their job and there were no severe events to disrupt transportation. I never ordered in the heat of summer, not because I was worried about the heat but because that did not fit my schedule. I acknowledged the risk was higher in February but did not think the risk was too high to take.

 

[Florida Bullfrog]

My brother is a retired rural route carrier. He's said most do it right but occasionally you get someone that sees a fragile stamp and has to toss it. Those types usually don't last long. You can get airline employees like that too.

I saw a long time USPS employee one city over from me do just that when he took a box of hatching eggs from me marked as fragile. He threw them as hard as he could 6-8 feet through the air onto the intake conveyor. The impression I had is that it got a dirty thrill from doing it. I quit using that office to drop things off.

 

[Clucktown]

I love cackle too.

if you must have all different breeds, you can probably try mypetchicken.

There’s really no fast and easy way to collect different breeds. I find it most rewarding when I do it slowly and patiently, looking at local craigslist and fb groups etc.

and to answer your original question, yes they ship okay, but always expect deaths on arrival. anything could happen during transit.

mypetchicken is awesome. I have 2 left from my order that are now 10 years old. Out of 8, one arrived in bad shape and passed shortly after. The remaining 7 all lived 6 years or more.

 

[Clucktown]

I had a great experience with Mt. Healthy this past May. I will definitely order from them again if I need to order chicks.

Really...? I was able to order all pullets, and I could order 1 of a breed if I wanted to (I did).

If you are looking for bantams, then you probably can't get them sexed. They're too tiny to vent sex safely, so hatcheries sell them straight run only.

Good luck!

mypetchicken sexed all of my 8 bantam hens correctly