Mocking Peeps

The two surviving eggers aren't egging much, so it seemed as good a time as any to tackle the bucket list item of raising yard birds from peeps.

After an inordinate amount of deliberation, and drunken approval from MacGyver, I ordered ten 1-3 week old chicks from Dare2Dream farms.  We and MaGyver have both purchased pullets from there, with varying degrees of success.  MaGyver's seemed to settle in for a happy season of laying until a mountain lion debacle.  Of the 8 or so adolescents we've acquired or been gifted by Ma, only 1 sex link remains and her survival instincts are far more impressive than her egg laying abilities.  A lot of our loss was likely due to high prey drive fur kids, but a couple birds went into inexplicable declines and had to be humanely dispatched.  So we weren't feeling super bullish about the health of D2D DNA, but they had 3 advantages that outweighed that concern.

1.  They do regularly scheduled deliveries by van to our area.  Seems way less stressful on chicks than entrusting them to the postal service (our alternative if we sourced through our favorite feed store).
2.  They offer a greater selection of peep breeds with easy online check out capabilities.
3.  We've seen their farm in person and appreciate that this is a family-ish farm, not a depressing chicken hangar like the 100's we pass driving over the river and through the woods to Grandmother's house in Delaware.

The species we selected/observations coming into day 7:

• 2 Barred Rock-- MaGyver's favored breed of her flock. These were the tiniest (youngest) peeps in the delivery.  One "pasty bum" got a blocked vent on day 5, but MacGyver seems to have restored her to her previous high spirits.  These have little white halos on their heads to differentiate them from the aussies.   
• 3 2 Easter Eggers-- the hardy exotic-egg-colored mainstay of our original flock albeit sourced from a different hatchery.  MacG considers these the "cutest" they are slightly bigger than the Rocks but still relatively young.  One declined late on day 4 and was dead by the afternoon of day 5.  Seems like coccidiosis and timeline-wise would match contraction on a pretty stressful day in a van.  This is a bummer in that if I had reported the peep "sick" it could have been exchanged since it was acquired within the week.  The "death" guarantee ends at day 4.  Grr.  But we didn't expect all 10 to make it to adulthood, we just wanted better guidelines on what to expect.  Bro-Epic's gift of a Small-Scale Poultry Flock book takes a very Darwinian approach to the whole thing.  Vaccinations and medicated feed be damned, make sure your small flock gets a varied diet, had dry bedding, and celebrate if a protozoa culls weaker genetic material out of your flock.  
• 3 Australorp-- intrigued by their spec sheet of high productivity and dual use utility.  Plus SoCal climate is on an equivalent northern latitude to southern hemisphere Oz, so it isn't implausible the birds adapted to one climate might do well in the other once they get their seasons flipped.  These are my (Belle) favorites.  There are 2 youngish ones that are slightly bigger than the easter eggers and a punk that is almost the size of the gold sex links whom I've dubbed "Rustle Crow."  MacG thinks he must be a rooster because he's tearing around the brooder, initially jumped out of the brooder and got wedged between its side and a wall until I could rescue him, and otherwise behaving like a pint-sized version of those kitchen raptors in Jurassic park.  His next-biggest sib seems to be adopting similar mannerisms, so I think it might be his growing up in a land full of poisonous critters rather than his/her chromosome count.     
• 2 Gold Sex Link-- supposedly productive and quiet, the ones we previously purchased were some of the first the dogs desqueaked.  These are the biggest of the haul, the delivery guy saying they were about a week older than the others.  That said, they are much more chill than contemporary-sized Rustle Crow.  They usually just swan down like little blond angels and let a bevy of smaller peeps pile up around them.  

Accoutrement:

We got the $75 brooder package because I was doing too much hang wringing to figure out of the heat lamp on AMZ would be delivered in time and whatnot.  

• Heat lamp + cage + clamp mount-- yes, awesome.  kinda wish the cage were fully closed since Rustle managed to almost burn herself jumping onto the edge of the box and I'm still nursing a singed knuckle.  
• Feed & Waterers-- We technically didn't need since we have a couple mouldering in our side yard from our last chicken integration apartheid (plus there are plenty of diy suggestions on youtube).  We've moved the waterer onto a slightly elevated slate shower tile to keep some of the bedding out of it.  
• Lidless cardboard box-- quickly became apparent this would not contain chicks beyond their first week of peeping as Rustle aptly demonstrated on day 1.  
• Feed-- convenient to have some on hand right away that was ostensibly what they were eating on the farm.  I'm a bigger proponent of the organic stuff when possible from Scratch 'n Peck rather than medicated pellets.  I sent MacG out to get the Scratch 'n Peck equivalent at the feed store but the only thing they stocked was grower feed for +5 weeks.  He's ground some of it up in his brewing mill to make it easier for small beaks and I mortar and pestled up some breakfast eggshells to act as diy grit until the AMZ drop shipment of age-appropriate feed shows up (ETA around the time they're 3-4 weeks old...) 
• Shavings-- convenient to have on hand.  Easy to acquire from a pet store run.  My preference would be some sort of straw or hay that isn't as easy to kick into the waterers and water log them.  

Tasks for coming weekends will be to get an outdoor situation of some sort set up for them so they can start sourcing their own grit, learning to perch, etc.  I'm not so sure we'll ever get to a carbon-neutral stage with them because the Justin Rhodes (awesome permaculturist) youtube interview with Karl Hammer pegged the table scrap needs to support a chicken without grain at 2lb/chicken/day (with caveats that some have found they need a lot more than that).  There's no way our kitchen generates 126 pounds of denser-than-lettuce-leaves refuse a week even when I am being most lax about avoiding food spoilage, so the culling may have to continue.