Treats and scaredness?!?!

[emys]

Playsand is cleaned. You can give it to them as is. They will pick around the larger stones. Just stick some in a shallow dish and leave it in the cage all the time. They will eat it as they need it.

 

[emys]

Sorry, just saw the second part of that sand post. I would not worry about them eating too much sand, I'd worry more about too much yogurt or eggs without sand/grit!!! You could seriously stop up their digestive tracts.

 

[Qi Chicken]

So a couple of tablespoons in a couple of hours doesn't seem out of line? I'd like to put a shoebox in there once in awhile so they can take a bath.

 

[Tala]

Quote:
They do tend to overeat it at first, but I don't think it has hurt any chicks yet. If they were outside you couldn't control how much sand they were eating

I think there was a thread on it recently, if you search you might find it. The consensus was that gobbling up sand hasn't hurt any of the poster's chicks yet.

 

[ChickenMama18]

We put ours in a small pen in the grass...they love eating the grass. This way we are in a smaller area to grab them and get them used to us handling them. It also helps them get used to us because sometimes we pick them up then other times we're just watching them so they are less worried about us being with them. Older kids are great for this part! Anyway, I mention it because the snacks help them come to us but not necessarily warm up in the sense of handling.

 

[Boo-Boo's Mama]

I have a shoebox of sand in with my 4 week old chicks and today added one to my 1 1/2 wk old BO. The 4 wk old chicks love it...they send sand flying; the BO were afraid of the box but finally got in and just now when I checked on all the girls I found that they had made a lil hollowed out place...appeared someone had tried to take a dust bath.

ETA: I started picking each of the chicks several times a day and talking to them. Some of the 4 week old chickies will come to the door and stand in line waiting to be picked up and held now. I hold them up close and talk low to them and they peep back very low. They like to look me in the face. I have named 2 of them in the last 2 days...can now tell them from the others.

I give the 4 wk olds yogurt with starter feed in it...they gobble it up. Also leaves from my beets...they love these and soon have the leaves stripped from the stalk. They also like the swiss chard leaves I gave them one day.

 

[clothdiaperingmom]

The 1st treat I gave mine was cooked spaghetti noodles. THEY LOVED IT!!!!
Then bread in tiny pieces. They walked all through the yogurt, but ate some.
Then crushed up crackers and cereal, popcorn, cheeto type thingys. Bagged salad recently, cantaloupe on the rhind.

I gave them all of that before grit or anything. They only recently started getting grit (they are 10 wks now)

My younger chicks didnt know what to do with cereal or cantaloupe. I havent given them any noodles yet.

 

[Kmf]

We have been dipping our finger in yogurt and then in their crumbles. OH MY GOODNESS, they just gobble it right off of our fingers. It's pretty cool. Normally they are pretty scared of us, but I have noticed that when we come around and put our finger through the chicken wire top they come running. My almost 4 year old thinks that it's so cool. She has to show everyone that stops by. I have noticed that just at 3 weeks that they aren't as afraid of us as they once were. Of course, there are still the few that scream when we pull them out of the brooder, but mostly they are getting used to us.

 

[bakerjw]

I picked the girls up from TSC on March 30th and they were already starting to lose some fluff then so I suppose that they are about 4 weeks old or so. As a side question, how long does it take them to start losing fluff? Being in the tub at TSC doesn't give them much of a chance at human interaction so I suspected that they might always be a bit on the wild side.

Anyway they are certainly afraid of me when I come to their enclosure which is a large fenced in area in the upper loft of my garage for them. There are a few who will pick at lettuce when I hold it in for them but they are still pretty skittish and don't really care to come see what the friendlier ones are getting. When I clean their place in the garage I put them out in a ring of fence in the yard (with my wife or son as the watchdog) I pick them up and stroke their backs. It seems to settle them down quite a bit. Some of them don't like getting off of my hand when I go to release them into either pen. But they're still quite skittish and I hope that it goes away in time.

They are certainly fascinating creatures.