Oh. My. Goodness. Our 8 baby chicks arrived via the United States Postal Service on April 25th and it’s been a bit of whirlwind since. I choose 8 based on my prediction of the egg quantity we would need and then hopped onto the learning curve of learning to care for a new type of animal. And not to insult any mommas out there, but being that I’ve only raised dogs (and done that since I was a kid), being in this unfamiliar new mom situation of not understanding what’s happening all of the time, or not having experience to know what’s a significant problem and what is just “gonna happen and turn out ok”.
Within 48 hours we lost a chick, and that was devastating. But also, I suppose, a gift that it happened before I had bonded with the chicks or named them. I named her Millie as Eric and I buried her under a tree near the house, shed tears over the unfair struggle she went through, then picked myself up to tend to the rest of my sweet girls.
I say girls until, right about the time we realized we may need a rooster for their future free ranging time, that realized our surprisingly large Betty was really a Burt.
That left us with 6 girls. Not enough future egg production for our needs and there was just something about the idea of continuing to buy overpriced quality eggs in our remote corner of the world that didn’t sit well with us. So, we ordered two pullets that were approximately the same age as our original flock.
That makes 8 girls – 1 one loss – 1 boy + 2 pullets = 9 total birds (8 girls, 1 boy) to round out our first flock. I’m so obsessed with them and will definitely write more, but for now, I need to run and check on them for the 5th of at least 10 times today…