Is there a reason they don’t use heat packs? Just wondering, is there a chance of chicks overheating?
I think the chick-shipping methods were mostly developed before heat packs became available. When they work well, there is no reason to change.
Hatcheries that ship very small orders (under about 15) usually do mention heat packs in their packing information.
And yes, there is a chance of chicks overheating.
I have no personal experience with heat packs, but I have read of them overheating and killing plants, reptiles, fish, etc. I have also read of them running down and being cold at some point, and the package being too cold when it arrives. Some years ago, I saw a chart of the temperature produced by a heat pack (one brand, one time). It got warm, went up to a range that's too hot for chicks, then dropped off to a too-cold temperature that would have left chicks chilly before arriving at their destination. There might be other heat packs that would be fine, but that one certainly was not.
Depending on the physical size of the heat pack, there is some risk of it crushing chicks as the box is jostled around.
There is also the issue of cost. The heat pack costs money. Putting the heat pack in the package takes extra time (more if it secured in some way, less if it is just dropped in.) That time costs money, because the hatchery has to pay the workers doing it. The heat pack also adds weight, which could increase the cost of postage, because postage is usually figured by weight. There will always be some people who order from the cheapest source, which means the hatchery that doesn't use heat packs will have an advantage with those customers.
And I know some or really most duck hatcheries I’ve seen had a minimum of 2 ducks per order and that doesn’t seem like enough to keep completely warm but correct me if I’m wrong! I’ve never ordered from hatcheries before but I was planning on.
I don't know for sure about the duck hatcheries. I am pretty sure those low minimums are a recent thing (within the last decade or so), and I think they are probably using heat packs in some weather (although I don't know for sure.) You could look on their shipping and information pages to see whether they say.
Also on the topic of your poor babies being shipped in bad weather…
this is really irresponsible of the hatchery. Shipping in good weather should be in the responsibility of the sender rather than the person ordering who, like you, probably doesn’t know any better! This is a huge thing in the reptile and fish community that people will refuse to ship pets during cold peaks and will inform the receiver of that!
Unfortunately, the hatchery CANNOT wait to ship the chicks.
They set the eggs 3 weeks before shipping, which is too early to know what the weather will be.
When the chicks hatch, they must be shipped within 24 hours. The Post Office requires this, and will refuse to accept chicks older than this.
Chicks absorb the yolk before they hatch, so they can go about 72 hours without eating & drinking. If the hatchery waits a day or two, they will be shipping chicks that starve or dehydrate in the mail, so they will die anyway. If the hatchery waits for the weather to clear up, it could often be a week, and the hatchery is not set up to raise chicks for that length of time. Besides, chicks that are a week old cannot be shipped through the mail, because they cannot safely go 2-3 days with no food and water (again, dead chicks, prevented by Post Office regulations that forbid shipping of chicks that age.)
When the weather is very bad, some hatcheries do cancel orders. It happened with Hoovers and McMurray [edit: and Meyers] last year when the Post Office cancelled flights & mail delivery because of extreme bad weather:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/th...ing-customers-to-the-end-of-the-line.1562129/
Customers were very unhappy about that too. At least one of the hatcheries sold large numbers of chicks to anyone within driving/trucking distance, and I'm not sure what the other one did.
Some of the people with canceled orders were not happy (understatement). There was discussion about whether hatcheries should try to fill their orders the next week (bumping all the people from that week, and annoying more people), or whether the hatcheries should just leave them to re-schedule later (chicks all sold out for months). I think everyone sort-of agreed that all options were bad, but disagreed about which was worse (the hatcheries had already made their decisions, so this was just people arguing about what the hatcheries "should have done.")
