Your Chickens in December [2014 Newsletter]

Ice Storm, Winter Chicken Care, and More: Robert Plamondon’s Poultry Newsletter December, 2014.

Ice Storm, Winter Chicken Care, and More

Robert Plamondon’s Poultry Newsletter
December, 2014

Sleep Well or Else!

I never got a November newsletter out. I’d been feeling increasingly tired, even exhausted, and I dragged myself to the doctor (Dr. Curtis Black at Philomath Family Medicine: he’s good), and got referred to Dr. Mark Reploeg at the Sleep Medicine unit of the Corvallis Clinic (he’s good, too), and … sleep apnea. Well, that would explain it! So I’m being treated and my energy is gradually returning to normal. I blog about this experience here.

Ice Storm

The dry fall ended and we got some rain, and then we got an ice storm, with temperatures hovering right around freezing and ice accumulating thickly on the trees, some of which hadn’t lost their leaves yet. Our power was out for over three days.

During the first evening, I stood on the front porch with a cup of coffee in my hands and listened to the sound of branches trees falling nearby. Crack! Thud! Repeat! It made me glad I live near a forest and not in one.

In the morning we found our mailbox smashed by a fallen limb, and the power wires down between our house and barn.

  

The chickens are all fine, with no damage to any of our rather flimsy chicken houses. The electrician fixed the downed wire with no problem, we got a new mailbox, and all is well.

Which is better than I can say for the neighboring forests. Plenty of limbs and big trees fell, including ready-to-harvest Douglas Firs. And a lot of medium-sized conifers lost their tops: the top ten or 20 feet of the trees bowed under the accumulated ice and then broke off. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Other notes:

  • Our Honda generator started on the first pull. This always amazes me! It had been sitting unused for a year, and we didn’t prep it for storage, we just closed the fuel valve while it was running, and let it run until the carburetor was empty and it stopped.
  • Several of the UPS systems we use for our computers (and even our TV) had disappointing battery performance, and I’m in the process of replacing some batteries.  I recommend APC Smart-UPS systems because they’re more generator-friendly than most, and are available with big batteries. I never buy them new anymore, since the units seem to last forever if you replace the batteries when they die. You can get used ones with dead batteries cheap on Craigslist, then replace the batteries, or you can buy refurbished units with new batteries over the Internet.
  • We ran low on seasoned firewood. Sigh.

Another Web Site (or Two)

As some of you know, I got interested in hypnosis after using self-hypnosis to eliminate my insomnia. My dad also taught me a couple of simple self-hypnotic self-help techniques when I was a child, especially to get through dental visits (dentistry used to be a lot less pleasant than it is now). So I took a full training course in hypnotherapy (and then two more), and opened a part-time practice in Corvallis: Robert Plamondon Hypnosis. Which has been a pretty cool experience.

But my newest site is for alternative/unlicensed practitioners in Oregon who want to do things legally and ethically, and also not run afoul of the sometimes-bizarre obstacles that the State of Oregon puts in our path.

The State of Oregon has chosen not to license a wide range of alternative and not-so-alternative practices (because it’s Oregon, that’s why). So there are broad exemptions, but also some rules, and the rules are more or less hidden, leaving people open to some nasty surprises. I had to do an amazing amount of digging to unearth even the basics.  This surprised me, because the other branches of the state government are super helpful and do all kinds of outreach.

Anyway, the new site is unlicensed-practitioner.com, and it sets forth the basics as I currently understand them, aimed mostly at the hypnotherapist/counselor/life-coach/NLP practitioner  end of things, which is the part I have some kind of grasp on.

Winter Care

I’ve written about winter chicken care many times before, so let me offer you just a few highlights and then a list of links:

  • Egg production falls dramatically when daytime highs fall below freezing.
  • Chickens are much more cold-tolerant if they are dry and out of the wind. They’ll get frostbitten combs and other problems not much below freezing in damp houses, but I’m told they hold up pretty well until about -20 F if they’re dry.
  • Chickens that roost in evergreens over the winter will have a wonderful time but won’t lay any eggs.
  • Egg production will fall after an interruption in water that lasts a day or longer, so keep it flowing! Other shocks (running out of feed, horrible weather) will also cause slumps in egg production.
  • Egg production will likely start climbing around New Year’s Day.

Here are links to past articles on winter care:

Norton Creek Press Best-Seller List

Christmas is coming! And the baby chick catalogs always arrive right on the heels of the holiday season, getting everyone fired up about the coming poultry year, so now is a great time to give books to everyone you know who likes chickens (or gardening: Gardening Without Work is a fun book).

These are my top-selling books from last month:

  1. Gardening Without Work by Ruth Stout
  2. Fresh-Air Poultry Houses by Prince T. Woods, M.D.
  3. Success With Baby Chicks by Robert Plamondon
  4. Feeding Poultry by Gustave F. Heuser
  5. Genetics of the Fowl by Frederick B. Hut

 

All of these are fine books (I publish books I believe in). If you’re like most readers of this newsletter, you’ll enjoy starting with Fresh-Air Poultry Houses and Success With Baby Chicks. These cover the basics of healthy, odor-free, high-quality chicken housing and zero-mortality chick brooding, respectively, and get rave reviews from readers.

I started Norton Creek Press in 2003 to bring the “lost secrets of the poultry masters” into print — techniques from the Golden Age of poultrykeeping, which ran from roughly 1900 to 1950. I’ve been adding an eclectic mix of non-poultry books as well. These include everything from my science fiction novel, One Survivor, to the true story of a Victorian lady’s trip up the Nile in the 1870s, A Thousand Miles up the Nile. See my complete list of titles at the bottom of this newsletter.

Recent Blog Posts

Here are my posts since last time:


December Notes

December weather tends to go from bad to worse, with freezing and power outages to keep things interesting. (See one of my blog posts about winter experiences with free-range birds in open housing.) On the other hand, most people don’t have any baby chicks in the brooder house in December, and adult chickens are relatively tough, so December is something of a low-stakes gamble.

Later in the winter, though, people start brooding their early chicks, so the stakes get higher. If you want to have pullets laying well by the start of a traditional Farmer’s Market season (Memorial Day), you need chicks in January. If you hatch your own eggs, that means hatching eggs in December. Slow season? Wait, wasn’t winter supposed to be the slow season?

Not to mention that the hatchery catalogs will start arriving right after Christmas, with special low prices on early chicks. By January, you’ll be on fire to start the new season!

December To-Do List

Inspired by a similar list in Jull’s Successful Poultry Management, McGraw-Hill, 1943.

  • Do final winterizing before things get really nasty. Stake down portable houses.
  • Ensure plenty of liquid water for your chickens in cold weather. Warm water is better than cold if you can manage it easily.
  • Give your chickens as much feed as they want. Winter is no time to save money on feed. Keeping warm requires lots of calories.
  • Use artificial lights to maintain the rate of lay and to give the chickens enough light to eat by on those short, dark winter days.
  • Remove wet or caked litter. If you use the deep litter system, toss it into a corner, where it will heat enough to dry out and decake itself in a few days.
  • Clean out brooder houses and make ready for early chicks.
  • Put out rat bait in empty houses (use bait stations and bait blocks: they’re less messy and more foolproof than other methods). Nobody likes using poison, but having rats invade the brooder house is worse. (Been there, done that.)
  • Get your brooders and incubators ready for the coming season. Lay in spare parts (heat lamps for brooders, thermostats for incubators, etc.)
  • If you have a breeding flock, figure out your matings now.
  • Sign up for farming conferences in your area.
  • Sit in front of the fire and read poultry books.

Practical Chicken Feeding Tips

There’s so much hype around nutrition these days that it’s easy to lose track of the basics. I’ve heard of poultry farmers who wanted to feed their poultry “naturally” and did so by feeding them nothing but whole organic grain — and were surprised when their poultry (turkeys, in this case) started keeling over and dying. But chicken feed is easy, right? What went wrong?

Well, everything!

Chicken Feeding Tips You Need To Know

So let’s review some practical chicken feeding tips, which will apply pretty well to ducks and turkeys as well:

  • Practical chicken feed — chicken feed that results in excellent health and high production, with no supplemental feeds — has been available since the Fifties. Name-brand chicken feeds — Purina, Land O’ Lakes, Nutrena, Diarygold, etc. — the kind available in your local feed store, are all okay. Buy a competently formulated chicken feed, and you’ll never have nutritional problems.
  • There are different kinds of chicken feed. Buy chick feed for baby chicks, layer feed for layers, and so on. Roosters do fine on layer feed.
  • Never lose sight of the fundamentals: vitamins, minerals, protein, energy levels. Nobody with a bad case of scurvy is going to get any better by eating organic bread. What they need is Vitamin C! Only after the fundamentals are satisfied does anything else matter.
  • Pasture and foraging will not provide the raw materials to correct your feeding errors. Always provide a nutritionally complete feed, even for free-range chickens.
  • The nutritional value of forage varies enormously from season to season, and even from day to day. Frankly, our ancestors kept chickens that were half-starved much of the time. Don’t do that! Always provide as much nutritionally complete feed as the chickens want. They’ll still forage, and foraging will improve the flavor of the meat and eggs.
  • As long as the chickens have a nutritionally complete chicken feed to fall back on, you can try feeding them just about anything: kitchen scraps, outdated bread, surplus fruits and vegetables, grains. If the chickens don’t like it or it’s bad for them, they won’t eat it. It’s hard to poison a chicken unless it’s starving. Onions and garlic in large quantities apparently can make eggs taste bad; otherwise you can feed just about anything that seems edible.
  • Chickens, like most creatures, have “nutritional wisdom”: if they’re short on protein, they’ll seek out protein-rich feeds at the expense of protein-poor feeds, and the same is true for calcium and other nutrients. This is why they will always thrive if you give them a balanced chicken feed to fall back on.
  • It’s possible to create a better chicken feed than you can buy in the feed store, mostly by allowing yourself a higher ingredient budget than the major providers use, but it’s probably not worth the effort for most people. You have to learn how to formulate nutritionally complete poultry rations and judge the quality of the various ingredients.
  • Sometimes people go into the feed business without learning the basics, and the results can be pretty bad. Don’t buy solely on the basis of a good-sounding label.
  • In general, the way to pick a feed supplier is to ask successful local flock owners who the best supplier is, and buy from them. By successful, I mean people who seem to be doing well, whose flocks look healthy, and who have been in business for four years or more. (Few people who are doing it wrong last more than three years.)
  • If you’re interested in doing feed formulation, or learning more about the topic, I recommend Heuser’s Feeding Poultry, which is an edition new enough to contain information about the difficult nutrients like vitamin B12 and methionine, but is old enough to remember how to put the nutrients into the feed without buying a commercial vitamin-mineral premix, making it the only book in print that shows you how to create a balance poultry diet from scratch. It also has a lot of practical small-farm feeding advice.


How I Slept Through Sleep Apnea

My father, Dan Plamondon, was a champion snorer.
My father, Dan Plamondon, was a champion snorer.

My dad was a champion snorer, could fall asleep anywhere in a minute or two, and had enormous difficulty getting up in the morning. He almost certainly had a severe case of sleep apnea, but he passed away before sleep apnea was widely understood.

You can see where this is going. I snore. I have trouble getting up in the morning, and, worse, my level of energy during the day has been plummeting. This has been going on for some time now. Sorta hard, when I have a full-time job and three businesses!

So I went to my doctor, and, after a certain amount of folderol that I’ll describe later, I have a shiny new diagnosis of sleep apnea and a fancy new machine to keep it from killing me.

How Sleep Apnea Works

During sleep, people relax, and some people relax so much that their breathing is obstructed as they inhale; their tongue shifts backwards or their windpipe closes, causing you to struggle for air and likely snore in the process. If the loss of air is severe enough, your brain wakes you up to allow you to gasp for air (successfully, this time), then you instantly fall back to sleep, after being awake so briefly that you don’t remember it in the morning.

The upshot: your quality of sleep is terrible, making you tired all the time, and the struggle for breath and low oxygen levels can cause all sorts of trouble.

Remedies That Didn’t Work For Me

Well, I don’t know about you, but I prefer being healthy and energetic. There are various minor things you can do about sleep apnea if you have only a mild case, and I tried some of these while I was waiting for the whole diagnostic process to complete:

  • Sleep on your side instead of your back. Didn’t stop my snoring, so it probably didn’t help my apnea.
  • Decongestants and nasal saline rinse. Ditto.
  • Mouth guard to help reposition your lower jaw slightly forward. The one-size-fits-all one I bought didn’t fit.

What Did Work For Me

The gold standard of sleep apnea treatment is the CPAP (continuous positive airway pressure) mask, which is basically just a very low-pressure air compressor with a hose and a mask that goes over your nose, or in some cases your nose and your mouth. This adds a little extra air pressure to make it easy to inhale in spite of your airway’s pesky tendency to close. There are different kinds of CPAP machines, from very basic models to super fancy ones.

The sleep medicine center at the Corvallis Clinic prescribes only the super-fancy automatic CPAP machines with lots of data-collection capabilities. I guess they figure they might as well, since the automatic features and instrumentation will surely save you at least one overnight stay in the sleep lab, so the extra features will pay for themselves.

From my point of view, the advantage of a fancy machine is that I can use the built-in instrumentation to fine-tune the settings until I have them just right. I’m an engineer, after all. (I respect my doctors and keep them informed of what I’m doing, but if there are knobs and switches to adjust, I’m gonna adjust them myself.)

Resmed CPAP unit

I selected a ResMed S9 AutoSet unit, which has a good reputation. This unit has every conceivable bell and whistle, including a HEPA filter and a built-in thermostatically controlled humidifier, which is pretty nice for a machine whose main purpose isn’t allergy control!

One of the spiffiest features is the “mask test” feature, which tells you whether your mask is leaking too much or not. They tend to leak a little, and it’s kinda scary to be left without any way of telling whether it’s a problem or not.


There’s a bit of a pretense that patients only have access to a few basic settings, but the keypresses that give you access to the provider menu are not much of a secret, since they’re available online in the ResMed S9 AutoSet Clinical Guide, which only took me about a minute to find.

All the sesssions are recorded on an SD card, which you can download into your PC and examine with the ResMed software or the freeware Sleepyhead software. I like the sleepyhead software best.

Here’s a small part of a Sleepyhead chart showing me having a sleep apnea event. The line on the chart goes up when I inhale and down when I exhale. Everything starts out okay, then gets sorta ragged, and at 1:47:15 I pretty much stop breathing for 15 seconds, then take a few big, gasping breaths.

Sorta stopped breathing there for a while.
Sorta stopped breathing there for a while.

Of course, I didn’t notice anything, because I was asleep at the time.

During my overnight sleep test, before treatment, I averaged 13.8 such events per hour. The first night on my CPAP machine, I averaged only 3.35. After adjusting the settings, I”m averaging about 0.3 events per hour, with none at all on some nights.

So How’s It Working?

My energy is coming back, but more slowly than I’d like. The thing that surprised me most was how much time I’m spending sleeping! But it makes sense (and it turns out that it isn’t unusual). After a long, long time with very poor quality sleep, I have some catching up to do. But my daytime energy is up, my caffeine intake is down, and once I do get up in the morning, I can get to work sooner than before.

Other CPAP Machines

I’ve also tried an XT Fit travel CPAP machine. No bells and whistles, but it gets the job done. I use it rarely, but it packs a lot smaller than the ResMed unit, and is also much less expensive.


How Bad is the Mask?

The masks take some getting used to. Most of them only cover the nose, anyway, so they’re not as claustrophobic as a nose-and-mouth mask, though these don’t bother me, either.

I made the beginner’s mistake of over-tightening the mask, which is very uncomfortable and doesn’t help anything.

I’m using a “nasal pillows” mask at the moment, and there’s some tendency for this to lead to a certain amount of air-puffing out the mouth, and if you breathe through the mouth when you’re asleep, this nullifies the benefit of the CPAP machine. I’m using an elastic chin strap, set without much tightness, to prevent this problem. I noticed that a puff of air tended to escape my mouth just as I fell asleep, and this was keeping me awake!

Conclusions

By the way, CPAP treatment also stops snoring completely. Some people may not think that a mask and a hose and a CPAP machine are very romantic, but a partner who snores is even worse!

The worse part about sleep apnea treatment is that people who need it are completely exhausted, so it seems like a lot of work. It is and it isn’t. Personally, I’m looking forward to having my energy again!


 Update, One Year Later

My return to high energy has not been happening as quickly as I expected, but I noticed something interesting: on days when I do a lot of driving, I take a lot of caffeine to make sure I drive safely, and on those days I feel better (more normal) and get more done. This sent me on a quest for non-scary stimulants:

Caffeine. This implies that I need stimulants to achieve a state of normalcy. I’ve experimented with caffeine pills to keep me going. At first, the right dose was 200mg of caffeine every three hours(!), for a total of four pills per day. It was important to take the first one even before getting out of bed. Now, I’m down to three pills per day.

Modafinil. I emailed my sleep doctor and he said that one of the newer “smart drugs,” Modafinil (Provigil) will give me better results without the caffeine jitters. Modafinil is often prescribed for people with sleep apnea who are using their CPAP masks faithfully but are still fatigued, and has an excellent record for safety and lack of weird properties, even with long-term use. I did not know that!

I started out on quite a high dose of modafinil (400 mg per day, half in the morning, half at at lunchtime), and this helped amazingly. The combination of caffeine and modafinil was a real life saver. As I’ve recovered, I’ve tapered off my modafinil usage to 100 mg per day.

adrafinil for fatigueAdrafinil. Modafinil is incredibly, appallingly expensive, but there’s an alternative. An older compound, adrafinil, is quite similar to modafinil and is available over-the-counter in the US. I’ve used adrafinil capsules from Absorb Health and they work great.

 

Other Remedies. See my I’m Tired of Chronic Fatigue post for more details about these and several other effective remedies I’ve used to boost my energy.

Bottom Line

My energy is slowly coming back. Some of this is due to the miracle of being able to breathe all night, thanks to my CPAP machine. Some is due to useful remedies, some of which are stimulants, and some aren’t. See my I’m Tired of Chronic Fatigue post for the full list.

As I recover, I need fewer stimulants, but the stimulants are important! It used to take me a couple of hours in the morning to be ready to do much of anything. Now I being work as I drink my first cup of coffee. That’s a huge difference!

A friend suggested that these issues can be cured without medical treatment, through, for example, hypnosis, but that’s not the way I roll. I love self-hypnosis, and I’m sure it’s helping with my returning energy. But a CPAP machine lets me breathe whether my affirmations have taken hold or not. Safety first!

Your Chickens in October [2014 Newsletter]

This Big Piggie, Cougar Attacks, and Fall Eggs

Robert Plamondon’s Poultry Newsletter, October, 2014

If you’re delighted with this newsletter, share it with your friends!

News From the Farm

This BIG Piggie Goes to Market

Karen with pastured pigs from Norton Creek Farm.

Mmm, bacon! Got room in your freezer? If not, it’s time to buy another freezer, because we’re about a week away from converting our pigs into pork. These happy outdoor pigs have been moved to fresh patches of pasture as they wreck the one they’re on, and have been fed on high-quality feed, whole grain, and the many cracked and stained eggs that are a yummy byproduct of our free-range egg operation.

(By the way, we’ve been criticized for admitting that we know where meat comes from, on the grounds that “children might be reading this!” So send the kids off to bed if you want them to continue believing in the Pork Chop Fairy.)

Our pigs are butchered by The Farmer’s Helper in Harrisburg, Oregon, the best custom butcher in the area. They show up with their mobile slaughter truck and dispatch the animals on the spot, in their own familiar pen, and the animals are gone before they know what’s happening. Most livestock are caught and transported to an unfamiliar place first, which is scarier for them. I like this way better.

After a brief delay, the fresh meat is ready — pork chops and roasts and all that — wrapped and frozen. The ham and bacon need to be cured first and take a little longer.  Our pigs are consistently fairly lean, but not too lean. Good, firm, flavorful pork, with bacon that’s mostly meat.

We haven’t sold all the pigs yet, so if you’re in the area and are interested in half a pig, a whole pig, or even more, drop Karen a line at nortoncreek.karen@gmail.com.

Cougars Can be Uneasy Neighbors!

Local farms have had a lot of livestock killed by cougars recently. You can see one prowling a sheepfold in this video.

Like many predators, cougars don’t have much of an “off” switch: they’ll keep killing until they run out of targets. In the wild, this doesn’t matter much: the targets scatter, and the predator has to settle for one or two kills. But penned livestock are another matter. The predators tend to keep killing until all the livestock are dead. “Take all you want, but eat all you take” has nothing to do with it: no “off” switch. So even the predator benefits very little. And this is not just cougars, but dogs, foxes, coyotes … you name it.

This means that the type of fencing can make a difference. A simple one-wire or two-wire electric fence doesn’t really pen in chickens, who will burst right through it when being chased by a predator, allowing the flock to scatter in all directions if a predator manages to get inside the fence. But chicken wire and relatively closed-mesh electronetting don’t allow the flock to escape, and losses can be very high (or total) if a predator gets inside.

Most predators never acquire the livestock-eating habit, contenting themselves with wildlife, but when a predator becomes a livestock killer, I think it’s good form to kill the livestock-eating predator and ignore all the others. No one really minds when the local cougars eat deer or the local bobcats eat rabbits, but when people’s sheep and chickens and cats and dogs start vanishing, that’s different.

The cougar in the video was killed by a trapper from the USDA Wildlife Service. I’ve had good results with these folks in the past, when the predator du jour was taking a toll on our chickens (and sometimes our barn cats), but I also learned how to do trapping on my own, which turns out not to be very difficult. (I learned both from the Federal trapper and from Hal Sullivan’s books and videos.) When a bobcat, raccoon, or coyote is killing our chickens, they typically drag it away from the scene, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of woodcraft to identify a feather-lined game trail! A snare placed along this trail will catch the offending predator. No need to declare war on predators in general. In Oregon, at least, snaring or shooting livestock-killing predators on your own property is perfectly legal.

I don’t enjoy snaring or shooting predators, but I have a responsibility to my livestock, one that’s inconsistent with allowing them to become a 24-hour all-you-can-eat buffet for the local wildlife.

Dry Fall Weather (and its Effect on Eggs)

Until today, we’ve had a dry fall, and that means the emerald-green grass that our part of Oregon is famous for is pretty much absent. What effect does this have on free-range eggs?  Karen recently did a taste test of our eggs vs. a couple of other local free-range egg producers to find this out.

By our own estimation, we came in second. Judging by the taste, one of the other producers is not only doing a nice job, but also has a greener pasture than we do right now, giving them yolks that are a bit darker and eggs that are a bit more flavorful. That’s what we get for living in a place with no possibility of irrigation, and a climate where the dry season stretches into October once every 5-10 years. Come on, rain!

The other eggs used a no-corn, no-soy recipe, and they tasted a little odd. No surprise there: replacing these two main ingredients in chicken feed seems like a pretty good idea until you try it. On paper, soybeans look far from ideal, but the situation reminds me of Winston Churchill’s comment about democracy: “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms.”

Since we keep telling everyone the secret of flavorful eggs, (giving the chickens access to fresh green grass), we’ll be content if we’re tied for first place after the fall rains green up the pasture again.

Another thing about the dry weather is that we’ve delayed setting up lights for the hens, on the grounds that stretching hundreds and hundreds of feet of extension cords across the pasture is a little scary if there’s the slightest chance that it could start a grass fire. Not that this is very likely in the ordinary course of things (though I’ve mowed my share of extension cords with the tractor). Production has been holding up nicely, so I doubt we’ve lost anything through being cautious.

Norton Creek Press Best-Seller List

These are my top-selling books from last month:

  1. Gardening Without Work by Ruth Stout
  2. Fresh-Air Poultry Houses by Prince T. Woods, M.D.
  3. Success With Baby Chicks by Robert Plamondon
  4. Company Coming by Ruth Stout
  5. Feeding Poultry by Gustave F. Heuser

 

All of these are fine books (I publish books I believe in). If you’re like most readers of this newsletter, you’ll enjoy starting with Fresh-Air Poultry Houses and Success With Baby Chicks. These cover the basics of healthy, odor-free, high-quality chicken housing and zero-mortality chick brooding, respectively, and get rave reviews from readers.

I started Norton Creek Press in 2003 to bring the “lost secrets of the poultry masters” into print — techniques from the Golden Age of poultrykeeping, which ran from roughly 1900 to 1950. I’ve been adding an eclectic mix of non-poultry books as well. These include everything from my science fiction novel, One Survivor, to the true story of a Victorian lady’s trip up the Nile in the 1870s, A Thousand Miles up the Nile. See my complete list of titles at the bottom of this newsletter.

Recent Blog Posts

Just one post on my farm blog since my last newsletter, but it’s a useful one:


October

Inspired by a similar list in Jull’s Successful
Poultry Management
, McGraw-Hill, 1943.

Traditionally, October was a month where pullets were just about to
lay, and were moved from pasture (where they had been raised) and into
winter quarters that were much closer to the farmhouse, and thus more
convenient for winter access.

Because many of the old hens
were still around, there tended to be more chickens than there were room for in the winter houses.
The usual technique was to cull all the early-molting hens, but to keep
the rest for another year. About half of the old hens would be sent to
market this way, sold as stewing hens. The winter flock would thus be about one-third old hens and two-thirds young pullets.

With modern hybrid layers, the flocks are much more uniform, and
most of the flock will molt at once. Only a few percent will molt
early. So the idea that you can sort the flock into 50% winners and 50% losers
doesn’t work very well anymore. They’re mostly winners.

October is the start of a big shift in what your chickens need from you. It only takes a few months of warm weather to make you blind to the
needs of approaching winter, so this month’s checklist is particularly  important– especially if you follow it!

October To-Do List

  • House pullets (if raised on range).
  • Do not overcrowd!
  • Repair doors, windows, cracks, roofs, watering systems, lighting
    systems.
  • Freeze-proof your watering system.
  • Replace litter. (If using the deep-litter method, replace enough
    of it that the house won’t be filled to the rafters by spring.)
  • Make a final culling of early molters (next month, pretty much
    the whole flock will molt)
  • Cull any poor pullets. (“One strike and you’re out” is the rule
    unless your birds are pets.)
  • Remove damp or dirty litter on an ongoing basis.
  • Use lights on layers. (14 hours of light a day between September
    1 and April 1, bright enough to read a newspaper at floor level, is
    traditional. Incandescent bulbs are much more trouble-free than
    compact fluourescents, but LED bulbs are probably the best (it’s a little early to be certain). Don’t use “indoor-only” compact fluourescents
    in a chicken coop).
  • Get equipment under cover. Don’t forget the lawn mower!
  • Stake down range houses so they won’t blow away. (I mean it. Do it  now.)
  • Summer houses such as tarp-covered hoophouses should have their
    tarps removed so they won’t collapse under snow loads.
  • Flag pasture obstacles and equipment with something tall so you won’t blunder into it n the spring, when grass is as high as
    an elephant’s eye. I have accidentally mowed feeders, nest boxes, faucets, sheet metal, and plenty of other things that got lost in the weeds. Bleach bottles
    stuck on the tops of T-posts are traditional ways of marking hazards.

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This newsletter is sent out occasionally by Robert Plamondon to anyone who asks for it. Robert runs Norton Creek Press.

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Day-Old Baby Chick Checklist: How to Prepare For Them and Care For Them

 beth_and_baby_chicks_smThe Most Comprehensive Baby Chick Checklist Anywhere!

Raising day-old baby chicks isn’t hard, and is delightful when everything turns out right. but doing it right involves a number of steps. You’ll have more success and fewer surprises if you use this handy checklist to stay on track.

Where Do These Tips Come From?

Success With Baby Chicks by Robert PlamondonThis checklist is adapted from my book, Success With Baby Chicks, available in paperback and as an eBook. Many items in the checklist refer to the individual chapters in the book that will give you lots of detailed information.

I spent years learning all the tricks of the trade before writing this book. When I started, my results with baby chicks weren’t all that great, but now they are, and yours will be, too!

Before Ordering Your Day-Old Chicks

Prepare the Brooder Area

  1. If you don’t already have a brooder house, build one or adapt an existing structure. See Chapter 14.
  2. Clear away any brush or trash that may have accumulated around the brooder house.
  3. Examine the brooder house for leaks in the roof, gaps in the floor, and rat holes—and fix them.black baby chicks with waterers
  4. If there are signs of rodents, set out traps or bait now, so the rodents are gone before the baby chicks arrive.
  5. If there is an infestation of roost mites or other noxious bugs, treat the brooder house now. This is most likely if other poultry have been kept in the house recently. See Chapter 15.
  6. If there is old litter in the house, decide whether you are going to re-use it. If so, prepare it as described in Chapter 13. Otherwise, remove the old litter and put in new.
  7. Acquire or build a brooder, draft guard, baby chick feeders, and baby chick waterers. See Chapter 5.
  8. Remove any feed left over from last time. Day-old chicks need fresh feed!
  9. Unless the weather is hot, close up the brooder house by closing all the windows and covering any sizable openings with tarps, sheets of plastic, or plastic feed sacks. Don’t go nuts with this: we want to limit drafts, especially at floor level, but don’t try to make the house airtight.

DANGER! If you are using vent-free propane brooders, it is possible for carbon monoxide to build up to lethal levels in a tightly closed brooder house. Install a carbon monoxide alarm if you’re going to use propane brooders in a non-drafty house.

Management Decisions

  1. Select a source for your baby chicks: a good hatchery or feed store. See Chapter 3.
  2. Select a breed. Consider trying a new breed by placing an order that consists of your favorite breed plus one that might be a contender, so you can raise them together and see which one you like best. Sometimes you can become a lot happier with poultrykeeping just by switching to a breed that suits you better!
  3. Last time, did your feeders or waterers frequently go empty? Did your waterers cause you trouble? Was there feed spillage? Are you happy with your brooder? Is there mud in front of your brooder house? Do you have a conveniently placed trash can? Is the water supply to the brooder house convenient and reliable? Does the wiring to your brooder house make you nervous? Is your brooder house permeable to rodents, pets, or predators? Now, before the baby chicks arrive, is the time to make changes.
  4. Is it time to build a new brooding area?
  5. Do you have enough housing for the chicks after they leave the brooder house? Maybe it’s time to build a new chicken coop.
  6. Were your chicks too crowded last time? If they had high mortality, a wet house, caked litter, feather picking, cannibalism, coccidiosis, or more than one or two chicks that became runts that never grew right, they were probably too crowded. Consider brooding only half as many chicks this time. It’s amazing how powerful that one change can be.

Ordering Your Day-Old Chicks from the Hatchery

  1. Write down the expected date of arrival and be sure a phone call from the post office will reach you.
  2. While you’re at it, write down the type of chicks ordered and the hatchery they were ordered from. If you’ve been considering more than one breed or more than one hatchery, it’s easy get lose track of what you really ordered before the chicks arrive!

Before Your Baby Chicks Arrive

  1. If this is the first batch of the season, turn on the brooder several days before the chicks are due to arrive to make sure it still works (often something unfortunate happens in storage, like corrosion). For later batches, start it at least 24 hours in advance.
  2. Buy fresh baby chick feed (chick starter). See Chapter 11.
  3. Buy or make feeders and waterers. See Chapters 11 and 12.
  4. Check the temperature under the brooder to make sure everything is okay. Do this enough in advance that you can do whatever it takes to keep from being chilled after they arrive.

    baby_chicks_drinking
    Put waterers just outside the brooder box.
  5. The floor under the brooder must be warm and dry to the touch before the chicks arrive. This is crucial!
  6. Install a draft guard, 10-18 inches high, around the brooder, with 2-3 feet of space between the edge of the brooder and the draft guard.
  7. Make sure there’s plenty of light for the chicks to see by. Baby chicks can’t eat or drink in the dark!
  8. Clean your quart-jar waterers and (if they are reusable) your first feeders. See Figure  1.
  9. While you’re at it, get the equipment that you will use only later into shape as well. Clean, inspect, and repair your automatic watering system (if any), feed troughs, tube feeders, “practice perches,” waterer stands, and other equipment that will be brought into use as the chicks get older.
  10. Double-check that your brooder is set up for day-old chicks, and has not been left the way it was the last time you used it, throttled back for older chicks who barely needed any heat.
Brooder area before baby chicks arrive
An old-time brooder area, all ready for the chicks. Box lids are set out as temporary feeders. Quart-jar waterers on set up on little wooden frames covered with hardware cloth. (This photo, and others in the sequence are from Rice & Botsford’s Practical Poultry Management, Sixth Ed.,1956, pp. 3-10)

When the Day-Old Chicks Arrive

  1. If you fetch the day-old chicks from the Post Office, run the heater in your car to keep them warm on the drive home if the weather is cool. If it’s warm, keep the chick box out of the sun.

    Baby chicks in their mailing box
    Baby chicks at the post office.
  2. Place the day-old chicks under the brooder without delay. Don’t leave the brooder house door open any more than absolutely necessary. Commercial chicken farmers simply turn the chick boxes upside down to dump the chicks under the brooders. This doesn’t harm them, and gets them into the warmth with a minimum of delay.
  3. Give the chicks warm water to drink immediately in quart-jar waterers, with at least one waterer for every 25 chicks. One waterer per 15 chicks is better. After chilling, dehydration is your biggest worry.
  4. Give the chicks feed in the first feeders either immediately or after three hours (opinions vary). The 3-hour delay is intended to resolve dehydration issues before the issue becomes complicated by feed. First feeders can be egg flats (1 for every 50 chicks), plastic cafeteria trays (1 for every 50 chicks), or the lid or bottom of the box the chicks arrived in.
Brooding area with day-old chicks
The same brooding area after the arrival of the day-old chicks. The chicks are already drinking from the quart-jar waterers and eating the chick feed in the box lids.

Caring for the Chicks, Days 1-2

  1. Don’t let day-old chicks get chilled. Check on the baby chicks several times per day. Move any that get lost back into the heat. Make sure they are warm enough. Make a special trip at nightfall to make sure all the chicks make it back under the brooder. Also check first thing in the morning to make sure they’re warm enough.
  2. Spend time with the chicks. If you deal with the chicks hurriedly or mechanically, all the fun goes out of poultrykeeping. Also, when things start to go wrong, you won’t notice. Take a few extra minutes each time you’re in the brooder house.
  3. Leave the lights on all night so the chicks can see to eat and drink. It’s not time to put them on a day/night cycle yet.
  4. Refill the waterers and feeders as necessary. The chicks will kick feed out of the first feeders, and it will be lost. Don’t try to prevent this.
  5. Each time you visit the brooder house, check under the brooder for sick or dead chicks. Dead chicks need to be removed immediately. Some first-week mortality is normal. The amount of it depends on the amount of stress the chicks underwent during shipping and the amount of stress in the brooder house. The highest mortality will almost always be in the first 48 hours. It should cease, or almost cease, after that.

Caring for the Chicks, Days 3-4

  1. Check on the baby chicks at least twice per day. Take your time.
  2. Keep in mind that chickens are easily stressed by sudden changes in routine, so make your changes gradually.
  3. Expand the draft guard to give the chicks more space and to make room for more equipment.
  4. Add larger feeders, either chick troughs or small (15 lb.) hanging tube feeders. Tube feeders should start with their feed pans flat on the ground. Troughs should be filled to the top. Use eight feet of chick trough per 100 chicks (two 4-foot troughs, four two-foot troughs, or eight one-foot troughs), arranged so the chicks can feed from both sides, or two tube feeder for every 100 chicks. Keep using the first feeders.
  5. Add larger waterers, either chick founts (which come in 1-, 3-, and 5-gallon sizes, 1 gallon per 50 chicks) or automatic waterers. These should be on stands that keep them above the floor and prevent litter from getting in the water. The waterers should be adjusted so the chicks have to stretch a little to get the water. This will prevent them from splashing in it and getting chilled. See Chapter 12. Don’t remove any of the quart-jar waterers yet.
  6. Discontinue all-night lights after three nights.
Day 3: Chick troughs have been added and the brooder guard has been removed. Box feeders are still used.
Day 3: Chick troughs have been added and the brooder guard has been removed. Box feeders are still used.

Caring for the Chicks, Days 5-10

  1. Expand the draft guard again on Day 5. If the chicks are getting past it, or the house is so small that practically all of it is inside the draft guard already, remove it.
  2. Remove the quart-jar waterers gradually, one or two per day, until only the large-capacity or automatic waterers remain. Keep an eye on the chicks; sometimes it takes longer for them to use the big waterers, and you’ll have to hold off removing the small ones.
  3. Remove the first feeders gradually, one or two per day, until only the trough or tube feeders remain.
  4. If tube feeders are used, check their height each day, adjusting them so the chicks are neither straining up nor reaching down to eat.
  5. If trough feeders are used, fill them a little less full day by day, because a full trough leads to a great deal of feed wastage.
  6. If overhead heat-lamp brooders are used, raise them a couple of inches higher at the end of the first week. If insulated heat lamp brooders are used, reduce the wattage of the bulbs at the end of the first week if the chicks seem comfortable. Turn down thermostatically controlled brooders by 5 degrees F.
  7. By the end of the first week, mortality should have ceased altogether, even if the baby chicks were overheated or chilled during shipping. If not see Chapter 15.
The same chicks during week 2. They have been given more space and larger waterers on wire stands.
The same chicks during week 2. They have been given more space and larger waterers on wire stands.

 

Remainder of Second Week

  1. Double the amount of feeder space. If using trough feeders, it may be time to replace them with ones designed for larger chicks. This will reduce feed wastage. Continue increasing the height of the feeders as the chicks grow.
  2. Pay attention to litter quality. Caked litter tends to appear around the brooder at this time, and wet litter tends to appear around the waterers. Remove both as they appear. See Chapter 13.
  3. Start increasing ventilation a little at a time.
  4. At the end of the second week (Day 14), turn down the thermostat another five degrees, raise overhead infrared heaters two inches, or raise insulated heat-lamp brooders an inch or two—whichever is appropriate to your brooder.

Third Week

  1. Except for broilers, add some “practice perches” to encourage early roosting.
  2. Turn the thermostat down or raise the brooder again, as appropriate.
  3. Increase ventilation some more.
  4. Keep checking the brooder house twice daily. It’s easy to fall out of the habit because this period is generally trouble-free.
Chicks sleeping at night. Their heat needs have gone down, and the space under the brooder has become too warm for comfort, so they sleep just outside.
Chicks sleeping at night. Their heat needs have gone down, and the space under the brooder has become too warm for comfort, so they sleep just outside.

Weeks 4-5

These are the last weeks of the brooding period. Depending on the weather, broilers may not need brooder heat after two weeks, Leghorns after three, and other breeds after four. But be prepared to give brooder heat to broilers for three weeks and other breeds for five. Add an additional week if you are brooding in winter.

As the chicks grow, they need a lot more space, and larger feeders.
As the chicks grow, they need a lot more space, and larger feeders.

The chicks get quite large during this period, and a brooder house that was fine yesterday can be crowded today. Crowding can lead to sudden outbreaks of coccidiosis (a protozoan infection), feather-picking, and even cannibalism. It is very important to have enough floor space to keep the birds happy and healthy for the entire brooding period. This is easy if they are being brooded in the same house in which they will live throughout their lives, but if they are outgrowing the brooder house, they need to be moved on time. Delay can be disastrous.beth_feeding_small_barred_rock_pullets

At the end of the brooding period, the feeders need to be swapped for larger ones that are suitable for adult birds, and (except for broilers) full-sized perches installed. For hens, nest boxes will be needed by Week 18 for commercial layers, or Week 20 for other breeds.

Once heat is no longer needed, the chicks can be moved outdoors if you have a yard or free range for them.

Learn More

This checklist will help you all by itself, but for more detail on raising baby chicks, read my book, Success With Baby Chicks, available in paperback and Kindle editions. It covers everything here and much, much more, with all the detail you need to do things right.