New Chicks!

A little over a week ago Little L and I drove to a farm in the country (yes, even more in the country than our house!) and brought home two chicks.  They were eight weeks old and still making baby chick sounds!  They came from a large free-range flock, which means that the chickens did not have any fences.  They could go anywhere they wanted and many slept in the trees instead of the coop.

These little chicks were at the bottom of the "pecking order". Chickens have to know who is the boss. They will pick on birds that are the weakest or the smallest, often pecking at them and keeping them from the food.  So these two little chicks were smaller than they should have been, and their tail feathers had been pecked quite a bit.

I put them into "quarantine". Quarantine means they can't go near our other chickens because they might make them sick.  (Chickens can have a lot of different health problems.) So I put them in an extra large dog crate that I made safe for chicks, and put them far away from our chicken coop.  They will have to stay in quarantine for 30 days!  During that time they cannot go near our other chickens.  During the daytime they leave the dog crate and spend their time in a movable chicken pen.  We are going to wait to give them names until they are done with quarantine.

I am glad I put them in quarantine because they have had bloody poop.  Bloody poop is a sign of a disease that often strikes chicks at this age called coccidiosis. They are on very expensive medicine to fix it and I think they will probably be fine.  They also had mites.  Mites are little bugs that like to eat chicken blood. (Yuck!) It is kind of like a dog having fleas.  So I have had to treat them for mites and so far it looks like that is working.  I treated them by dusting them!  (More about that later.)

These little chicks are really nice.  The bigger one is a Speckled Sussex and the other is a Welsummer. Those are two breeds of chickens. (An example of breeds in dogs would be a poodle and a golden retriever - they are both dogs but have different characteristics).  The Speckled Sussex is very tame and will sometimes let Little L pet her. The Welsummer is a little more wild and doesn't like to be caught or picked up. She lets me know with a squawk how unhappy she is to be caught!

Here are some pictures of them on the first day they came home.  As you can see, they were in tough shape. But don't worry because they are doing better and getting bigger.  I will put new pictures up soon.