Circle M Farm

We got our baby meat chickens this past week – 100 of them mailed to us in a box! See the video here….

Here’s what they looked like when they came. Yes, they are ridiculously loud. That’s a survival mechanism to help babies find their moms, should they become separated. Of course, these day-old chicks have all been separated from their moms. Actually, they’ve never met their moms since they were brooded as eggs in an incubator – but they will instinctually make a lot of noise until they adapt.

These chicks, heritage White Rock roosters ordered from Murray McMurray Hatchery in Iowa, are shipped the day after they hatch and can survive for up to three days without food or water. They come out of the egg nutritionally self-sufficient. When they hatch with mothers, they simply follow the hen’s lead and learn how to peck for food and drink. When we took each of these out of the box, we dipped their beaks into a water fount in their pen, and then dipped their damp beaks into the feed so that some crumbs would stick. That’s enough for them to figure out feeding themselves! At least it’s enough for enough of them that they can model it for the rest.

While baby chickens are remarkably independent when it comes to food, they are very dependent on us to keep them warm. Again, if they had hatched out with their mothers, they’d simply stay under her warm downy breast when they got cold. Here in our garage, we provide heat lamps so that when the babies are cold they move in towards the light. They also clump up close to each other for warmth. If the babies get too cold, they could squash each other in a desperate attempt to get close enough to elevate their temperature. The box they are shipped in is just the right amount of tight for them to be close enough to stay warm without trampling each other.

Here they are at a week old snuggled up under the warm heat lamps:

One chick has already been able to fly up into the feeder! Pretty soon the watering trough that is their home in our garage will have to be covered with screens so they don’t fly out. When the weather is warm enough, they will move outside into cozy “chicken tractors” that we’ll move every few days to new ground.

Tomorrow, I go to pick up 25 Red Bourbon Turkeys from a farm in Iowa. These are the breed of heritage turkeys Barbara Kingsolver raised during her year of eating locally and wrote about in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Not only are they a bit bigger than the rather petite Chocolates we raised last year, but they are just stunning to look at. We had our share of troubles with our overly-friendly (they pooped incessantly on our porches while coming to look for us) and overly-curious (they often wandered off to the creek and had to be herded back) turkeys last year, but we are going to try to keep them a little bit more corralled to their shelter this year. Our perennial challenge with poultry here at Circle M is to allow them to wander and forage and act as much according to their nature as possible, while still being able to catch them up come butcher time!