Hot Chicks

Goodness, I hadn’t realised I’d taken such a long time off blogging (nearly three weeks in fact). It wasn’t intentional – it just sort of happened! Life has been busy on the farm with the angling season well underway and various other activities.

So a quick catch-up is due.

TT is now huge and living outside in the eglu. His rechickenisation has begun.

Plus he was getting too big to stay indoors. When he roosted on his brick in his fish tank home, his head was nearly touching the lid. We didn’t have any alternative accommodation for him. He’d been living in front of the TV in the evenings, having spent most warm days in the run in the garden (on his own since the attempt to integrate him with the turkeylings didn’t work – they picked on him!), and I think the change to a TV-free environment has been tough. I’m sure he also misses playing games with Rors on his tablet. He seems to be an ardoise cross breed, but we have no idea who his mum and dad were.

TT and the turkeylets

And now we have another half dozen chicks. Most of these guys hatched during the Eurovision Song Contest a week ago. So names will include Eurovision, Estonia and Conchickta. At present they all look very similar so only one has a name – Eurovsion, who is Yoyo for short.

Here’s a very very new chick, a few seconds after hatching.

We left each chick in the incubator until it was completely dry and then transferred them to a hastily-assembled brooder.

They didn’t like to be kept waiting.

Our brooder consists of a polystyrene box with newspaper and wood chippings on the bottom.

The infra-red bulb keeps them toasty warm. These are the hot chicks referred to in the blog title – hope you’re not disappointed! They’re at 37.2 degrees C in the incubator so you need to keep them at 35 degrees C for the first couple of days in the brooder before you slowly reduce the temperature to acclimatise them to normal daily temps.

The chicks have been outside once during the week when we had a lovely hot day.

The chicks aren’t the only ones to be newly outdoors. We’ve at last got some goat fencing organised and Hughie, Dewy and Louie are grazing in their new field. Chris kept an eye on them the first hour and they were very well behaved.

But not good enough to be allowed to share an ice cream!

Long may their goodness last.