Posted on by Crystal Sands

On Getting Started with Baby Chicks

I hope I’m wrong, but I think we’re looking at a future in our country that looks different than what we have been used to. We will get through this, but our economy might struggle for a while.

With that in mind, I am starting an educational series on chickens and gardening with an eye toward doing it as frugally as possible. You see, my husband must be one of the most frugal and efficient humans in the country, and over the last six years, I have learned from my husband and he has learned—from both research and by following his intuition—how to create a cycle of homesteading that is highly self-sufficient.

And frugality and self-sufficiency are what we are probably going to need for some time.

So I’m starting a series of instructional essays on how to get started with chickens and then how to use them to help create a little homestead that is as self-sufficient as possible.

This week, we start with how to prepare for baby chickens. I’ll start with a list of supplies and offer notes and links on each one below.

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Supplies

Some kind of brood box

Some kind of bedding material

Baby chicks

A chicken waterer

Chicken vitamins or electrolytes

A food dispenser

Chick starter

Heat lamp or chicken heater

Temperature gauge

Some kind of brood box

To be frugal on this, my husband built a brood box out of scrap wood, but we also have one that is just a giant plastic bin from Walmart. They are pretty cheap. In fact, you may have one at home already. I just recommend getting the biggest one you can get, depending on the number of chicks you plan to start with.

When the chicks are really little, almost any kind of big box will due. Just keep in mind that the babies will grow quickly, so while you have them in a brood box, be planning for the next stage for when the chicks feather out (get their feathers). You will want a safe coop for your chickens, but I will talk about that in a separate post on coops and coop options.

Some kind of bedding material

You can get a bag of pine shavings, which will work great, for about $6.00 at Tractor Supply. But you can get by more frugally than this even. If you have trees and have dried leaves, you can just crumble those up and use them. Then, there’s no cost for this.

The key is to not use something like newspapers or paper towels. You want something with “give,” so your baby chicks do not get splay leg. Think about the goal as to recreate a baby chick just being on the earth. There’s grass and “give,” so you want something like that, but it doesn’t have to cost you anything.

You will just change the bedding when it gets poopy.

Baby chicks

You have options on this too. You can order chicks online, find them in the spring at farm and feed stores, or get them from a local chicken lady.

The thing you will need to know is the difference between a straight run and sexed chicks. If you live in an area where you can’t keep roosters, you want to get sexed chicks and make sure you just get girls. If you get a straight run, you will get a mix of boys and girls, and baby boys do turn into roosters.

However, with issues of self-sufficiency coming to the forefront, if you want to be able to make your own chicks (another post on this coming soon), you will need at least one boy.

A chicken waterer

You need an official chicken waterer because you don’t want your babies to drown in a big bowl of water, but, thankfully, waterers are cheap. You can get this one at Amazon for less than $15.00, and if you have a small amount of chicks, say 10 or less, you can just get this small one for $8.00.

My best advice for you is to be very diligent keeping the water clean. It helps so much in the long run, as dirty water or lack of water leads to health problems that are easily avoided by just keeping the water clean every single day.

Chicken vitamins or electrolytes

Some say these are not necessary, but I am a believer in this, as I think getting chicks off to a good start is going to help so much in the long run. Plus, they are cheap. You can get a bottle for less than $10.00, and you don’t even have to use a whole tab per gallon as directed if you want to stretch things a bit. But one bottle will last a long time and will cover several rounds of baby chicks. It can also come in handy later when your chicks are all grown up. I give our adult flock the electrolyte tabs in their water on hot summer days.

When you clean the water every day, just dissolve a portion of a tab into the water. It’s easy, cheap, and does a lot of good.

A food dispenser

You will want to use something other than a bowl or plate for food because chicks poop a lot, and they will poop in the food. They will also spill the food. And you don’t want any food to be wasted. You can get a plastic feeder for around $5.00.

Chick starter

You will to get some baby chick food as well. This comes in bags and can be found online and in feed stores. You will see both medicated and non-medicated chick starter. We have used both, but I recently learned from a vet that, if you are just running a small backyard flock, the non-medicated is all you need, so we have stuck with that the last couple of years. But some people want the medicated, and that’s fine too.

A 50 pound bag of food will cost about $17.00. How long that lasts depends on how many chicks you have, of course, but a big bag like that should last a while.

Heat lamp or chicken heater

Without their feathers and without a mama, baby chicks will need to be kept warm, so you need some kind of heater. Because I have a fear of fire, we now use a more expensive plate heater, but, for real, if you are careful, the heat lamp is just fine for a good while. Just never put it in the coop! More on that in another post.

A heat lamp and brace will run you about $10.00, and the bulb will run you another $5.00. Just be sure to get the red bulb, as white light will keep the chicks from sleeping, and you don’t want that. Babies need rest, of course!

Temperature gauge

Finally, you need to know what the temperature is in your brood box, so you will need some kind of inexpensive temperature gauge. I found one online for about $8.00. These are temps  you want to aim for.

Weeks 1-2 = 95-100 degrees

Week 3 = 90-95 degrees

Week 4 = 85-90 degrees

Week 5 = 80 to 85 degrees

After that, you can judge based on where you live. If it’s really cold, you may want to keep a heat lamp going, but mostly people brood in the spring, and when the chicks get feathers, they are usually fine without heat.

One thing I can say after seeing a mama hen raise baby chicks is that the babies are tougher than you think. If your temps are a bit off, it’s better to be a little cooler than a little hotter. And watch the chicks. If they start desperately staying away from the heat lamp and drinking a lot of water, it’s too hot for them.

One last tip I have: If you are keeping baby chicks for the first time, just know some of them are going to sleep like they’re dead. It will give you a panic every time. Mostly, though, things are going to be okay.

I made a video for some additional support. I hope you find it helpful!

You can do this, and I am going to be here to help. One thing I want to be able to do now is share what I’ve learned with others. I can’t keep enough chickens to give everyone eggs, as I would like to, but I can teach people how to raise their own food.

One thing that’s awesome about chickens is that they begin to produce quickly. Depending upon the breed of hen you have, you will see eggs in as few as 18 to 20 weeks, so your upfront investment pays off quickly.

Good luck, and check out my Pajamas, Books, & Chickens Facebook page for more YouTube videos.

*Please note: I am a small blogger and am not paid for advertising these products listed in this blog post. I simply researched for the best deals I could find online. Of course, you would be able to find these products elsewhere, especially at local feed stores.

Posted on by Crystal Sands · 3 Comments

On Treating Respiratory Illness in Chickens (or My Winter as Chicken Nurse)

It all started, really, with the loss of my Poe. She was a black Easter Egger who had my whole heart. About a month after Poe died, we had our first hawk attack in the whole six years we have been raising chickens. And I came upon it right in the middle of the attack.

It was my worst nightmare as a chicken keeper. One of my original hens, one of my precious Rhode Island Reds, was being eaten alive. I scared away the hawk and scooped up my girl. She wrapped her little feet around me so tightly and leaned into my chest. I will never forget how I could sense the relief in her, the relief that mama had saved her.

When she spit up blood, and we got a good look at her wounds, I realized mama hadn’t really saved her at all.

The second hawk attack was less grim for me because my girl was already dead, but I was still devastated. Honestly, I felt like I couldn’t take any more and was struggling to decide if I could continue to be a chicken farmer.

We have a large fenced area (about ¾ of an acre) for our chickens, complete with lots of trees and many places to duck and cover. In all of our years of keeping chickens, we didn’t have a single hawk attack. When we had two back to back, I started to research heavily. I knew confining everyone to the run was the quickest solution. I read that due to lower than normal numbers of birds in our area, hawk attacks were on the rise. Things were going to change for us, in terms of how we had been raising our chickens.

But I had read in some folklore (and while I am an academic and science lover in my mind, I am a folklorist at heart) that black chickens, which look like crows, can help keep hawks away.

It made sense in my heart-broken desperation, of course. With Poe, we had no hawk attacks. Without Poe, hawk attacks.

So I went online and found a local chicken girl with black Easter Eggers. I was a little worried that the hens, though beautiful, seemed lethargic. We kept them in quarantine for a few days. I was mainly worried about mites. I saw no signs of anything and put them with the flock. I knew I was breaking the 30-day rule, but I had never been able to follow the 30-day rule. We just didn’t have a second coop. I had been lucky so far.

This time, I would not be so lucky.

Within a few days, everyone in the flock was acting kind of strange. That’s the only way I can describe it. I remember closing them up one night and realizing they didn’t talk back to me when I told them goodnight. I was scared about what might be going on. Within a week, my first hens were coming down with respiratory issues, and these issues were pretty epic. If I thought the hawk attacks had been my worst nightmare as a chicken owner, I think the realization that my entire flock had been exposed to a serious respiratory issue ran a close second. It was devastating, and it was my fault.

I am terrible at making a long story short, but I need to. I want to help inform others about what I went through and what worked as treatment—and what didn’t work.

I contacted my vet, and we were not able to test for Coryza, but my flock experienced almost all of the symptoms. Because we are not sure if we had Coryza, we have decided to play it safe and keep our flock closed for the rest of ever. It’s tough. I raise good roosters, but I would never want to risk someone else going through what I went through.

The main symptoms were rales, runny nose, sneezing, and swelling around the eyes and face on some birds. Some also experienced gunky eyes. The only symptom of Coryza we did not experience was the smelly, runny poop. However, I have read that respiratory illnesses can be pretty severe and still not be Coryza, so there is a chance we just had a really bad respiratory illness. Still, I proceeded as if I was treating Coryza.

The rales were the worst, I think. We started out isolating birds who showed signs in our garage, and the rales were so loud some nights I could hear them in the house. It was like some kind of Edgar Allan Poe story where I was being constantly reminded of my sin of bringing in the sick birds, who just so happened to be black. You can’t make this stuff up.

I spent months treating what would eventually turn out to be every single member of our flock. Morning and night, I would do rounds of treatments on my sickest patients. Some were highly cooperative; some were not. Of course, they were grumpy at being so sick. I was bitten and scratched, and, of course, I deserved it all, I thought. I work full time and also homeschool my kiddo, so being a nurse to 30 chickens took a toll for sure. I felt so worn.

But I think the worst night ever was when one of original hens and favorite birds was at her worst. I had been to the vet and had antibiotics, but she had grown very sick very quickly. She’s my oldest hen and my sweetest girl. Her face was so swollen. Both eyes were swollen shut and were bulging. I didn’t know if the antibiotic would work quickly enough, and I found myself researching again, this time the most humane way to kill a chicken, if I had to do it. She lived in our bathroom for over a week and recovered fully, but I remember the dread I had each time I had to treat her because I was terrified of hurting her or making things worse. As an empath, I am a terrible, terrible nurse, but I have found that being a chicken farmer does force me to find strength I didn’t know I had.

In the end, I was treating someone from November 1 to the end of January. Finally, finally, we are down to maybe a sneeze every now and then. The hens are laying and are able to get outside some now. We are now able to stay in prevent mode, which is just a wonderful relief.

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Below, you will find a list of symptoms and treatments I used. I am just completely honest here about what worked and didn’t work for me. Others may have different experiences, of course, but I wanted to share what I did, as we did not lose a single hen. I read everywhere that the best thing to do is to cull. I am so glad I didn’t. Everyone made it through, not a single death, (and I have some old hens) and I learned a lot.

Symptoms

Rales (loud noises with every breath)

Runny nose

Sneezing

Gurgled breathing

Swollen face and eyes

Gunky eyes

 

Treatments

Treatment How Applied Effect
Vet Rx Warmed and applied to nostrils and around the head. The instructions say you can administer it orally, but I chose not to. The instructions also say to put some at the wing, where the chickens tuck their heads, and I did this, only I didn’t keep it to the wing. I noticed where each individual chicken preferred to tuck in and then applied the Vet Rx in that spot. The purpose of this is so the chicken can breathe in the vapors. It’s kind of like an herbal Vicks. This had little effect that I could really notice—but some. I think it may be helpful with much milder symptoms, but I also think it maybe took the edge off when things were at their worst.
Oregano Oil/Olive Oil I dosed chickens with 1 ml of olive oil before I got the oregano oil. I used a syringe and put the 1 ml down their throats. Both of these seemed to do some good relieving some of the rales—at least taking the edge off. I think the oregano oil worked a little better, but both seemed to help.
Oregano I added dry oregano to food and to nesting areas several times throughout the winter. It is difficult for me to say if this helped. I can only say it didn’t hurt.
Grapefruit Seed Extract I added 30 drops per gallon of water every day when I changed the water. The idea with this is that it supposed to help the immune system, kind of like apple cider vinegar. I couldn’t tell much from this, but my chickens did recover. It definitely didn’t hurt and could have helped.
Colloidal Silver I gave sick chickens 1 ml of this in the morning, and when things were at their worst, I tried to do the 1 ml in the morning and at night. This helped more than anything I used, outside of the antibiotics. I found out about it a few weeks in, so I didn’t have it right away. I found it to be amazing at reducing the head swelling and just shortening symptoms overall. I had one hen come down with a very swollen face. I gave her a dose of Colloidal Silver, by the evening, the swelling was almost completely gone. It is supposed to be an immune system booster, and it worked better than any natural treatment I have ever seen. I will never be without it again.
Antibiotics I took one hen to the vet for help and to get a prescription for antibiotics. Everything I read said to use Tylan 50 for this kind of issue, but it is no longer available over the counter. The vet actually prescribed a different all-around antibiotic.

I am hesitant to use antibiotics, but I used it on my Broody Hen because she was in the worst shape. I used it on one other very old hen, who was having a hard time, and one of our roosters. Our other rooster wouldn’t let me dose him.

 This worked, of course. Broody Hen’s eyes were so infected I thought we were going to lose her, but after two days on the antibiotics, the swelling was down and she was on the mend.

The issue with this is that my vet visit cost more than $200. Also, as I heard and then learned from this experience, the illness can and did come back, just as with other treatments. Everyone who was treated with antibiotics did relapse.

But I am glad I had the antibiotics for my Broody Hen.
Clean Dry Coop As soon as we found out what we were dealing, my husband and I stripped down the coop and cleaned it from top to bottom. My husband vacuumed any dust in the nooks and crannies and in the rafters. This worked, but it’s critical to keep it up, like forever. You have to make sure you have really good ventilation, and you just have to keep the coop really clean.

Recently, after everyone seemed to be healed up and over the respiratory illness, we had some really damp cold weather, like swampy and miserable. The coop got a little damp because we forgot to open up the front vents, and two chickens started sneezing and gurgling again.

I think we may be looking at a life-long issue with our flock, though I hope not. Either way, keep the coop super clean and dry for the rest of ever seems to be critical.

I think the moral to this story is to not give up hope, even if your entire flock gets really sick. I have some really old hens who took a long time to get well. Both of my hens who had the antibiotics were older and relapsed pretty hard. They were both sick for nearly two and a half months! But you would never know it now. They are running around, busying-bodying more than ever.

If you have tried and succeeded with other treatments, please share your experiences in the comments!

*Please note I was not paid to promote any of these treatments. I simply research treatments others had tried and tried them myself. My opinions are based only on my experiences treating my chickens.