Treats???

[the Precious Ladies]

Hello! I was wondering when and what treats I can give my chicks

 

[wing it]

It really is best just to give them yogurt or boiled egg chopped up fine for the first few weeks.

 

[Chieftain]

I started mine right away on a pinch of corn grits and some fine sand. As long as they have some grit, they can eat other things besides just chick rations. Chick scratch, corn meal, and even small meal worms are great! Yogurt is a great treat as well as an excellent dietary supplement, as long as you give them only as much as they can eat in about ten minutes, to avoid giving them the scoots...

 

[Mrs. Fluffy Puffy]

A grape cut in half, yogurt, grass, boiled egg, um ... if I think of anything else I'll tell ya!

 

[Ariel301]

Ours have free access to a chick starter feed and we give them treats besides. If you offer treats (except for soft things like yogurt or cooked eggs) you should also give them grit. We offer ours a little scratch feed, worms from the garden, boiled or scrambled egg, homemade goat yogurt with probiotics, oatmeal (watch them with this as we found they can drown in it if one gets trampled down and stuck in the sticky food during the feeding frenzy!), and finely chopped fruits and vegetables. Their favorites seem to be strawberries and oranges. We just cut the orange in half and stick the halves in their brooder and 30 chicks will devour a whole orange like that in an hour or less! They also like shredded cabbage a lot (be aware that if you use purple cabbage they will have some strange colored poop for a few hours). They are pretty indifferent to apple slices but shredded carrots go over well, as do bananas and broccoli, and even homemade chicken broth with no salt. Cooked brown rice or whole-grain pasta or cooked beans are tasty treats too. Just be sure what you feed has no salt, as birds don't process salt well, and stay away from sugar, preservatives, etc. Basically all the stuff that is bad for you is extra bad for them because they are so small.

 

[the Precious Ladies]

Thank you all for the great advice

 

[felidaet]

Last year I gave mine a little bit of crushed cheerios after they were a couple of weeks old. I had grit available for them. If they wanted cheerios they had to eat them out of my hand. Great way to get them to like your hand.