Chickies

As always, when it gets busy we have a tendency not to post as much. Although in a perfect world, the busier we were the more we should post to keep up with what we're doing.

Well, the last chickie count was 10 inside and 3 outside. Then the Sumatra hatched out her chicks which moved the count to 23 inside and 3 outside. We had one chick get trampled by the rest (we have them in two separate brooders) and so we had to separate him and try to bring him back to full health. That was working but in the mean time the mama Sumatra was dragging her chicks all over the place and had one injured chick. We called him Rolly and brought him in. Tended to his wounds and had him sleep and eat as much as he wanted. Melody called the trampled chick Derp, so that stuck. Unfortunately, Derp ended up passing one night, so although he looked as if he was getting better he was not able to get over all the trauma caused by it.

And after chasing chicks all around the baby room I asked one of our neighbor if he still wanted chicks and as soon as he said yes I came back in the house and grabbed all the polish chicks I could find and the smaller ones and brought 6 chicks in a box to him. Rolly did go with this group since most of his energy had gone into healing and not into growing. We'll see how he does.

On to sad news - there is a Giant that has sat on her nest for a while and I keep finding dead babies. I'm not sure what is causing it as I've never seen anything like it. I'm going to ask some of our local farmers as well as some of our online community to see what they think. The same thing happened to the geese. All the babies were dead in the eggs. They were fully developed, but not alive. Depressing, but we'll see what we can do for next year.