Orloff Babies - 15 days old - got too big for first Brooder

Last night, the ten chicks were all piled on top of each other under the warmth of the little light that I had on top of the brooder. Obviously, the level of the Brooder Warmer (EcoGlow) was too low for them now to comfortably fit under. I popped it up one level and we were good to go. On the other hand, the first brooder box for them was only 4 square feet (21" x 28") and they were getting quite cramped in there too now that they have doubled in size.

Thankfully, we still have 10 little fluff balls in feather development. I put together a quick large brooder and put it on a folding work table. The brooder is 26" wide and 68" long for a total of 12 square feet.  The walls are 18" high so it was essential that I place some baby gates on top of the brooder. I parceled off 2/3 of the brooder (to 8 square feet). This new space is giving them way more room to stretch their wings and do a little practice flight.

We are done using the towels for flooring.  I put in some of the shredded recycled paper crinkles from the pet store for them. They pick up the paper strips, but they don't eat it. They are "scratching" the floor and moving the paper around, then pecking on the floor, just like chickens. They also nestle into the paper like a little nest. But this will be way too expensive to continue to use. When I run out of the paper bedding, I will switch to something else. Probably wood shavings.  I'm just not comfortable yet using the shavings. 

I did some one-on-one social time with each  of them this afternoon. A little egg yolk mash does wonders for making friends. :) 

Here are some better pictures of the baby orloffs at 15 days of age.

Ten Russian Orloffs in Eleven Days

The babies seem to be doing fine. Ten days was when we started losing them last year so we are hoping for better luck this time around. 

We are getting ready to transition over to wood shavings.  I've been hand washing their "poop" towels.  First, I decided to use towels to start them off with this year instead of shavings because last year, they kept picking up tiny wood shavings as food, and I really don't think that was good for them. Also, I felt it would be warmer in the brooder with a towel on the floor and also it would not be slick so that they would not end up with spraddled/splayed legs. Search the terms if you want to see what it means and looks like. 

So, I've been cycling a few towels as flooring for the brooder by washing two, every couple of days. Mind you, I had no intention of putting the soiled towels directly into my washing machine!!! EWWWW! I would take the towels outside (over my compost pile), and shake off/out as much stuff as possible. Then I would soak the towels in a bucket for a few hours to loosen the stuck on pooh. Next, I would use me $2.50 agitator in the bucket.  For an agitator, I picked up a basic toilet plunger, cut out three three-quarter-inch holes that I drilled through the rubber (evenly spaced around the plunger).  I use it to agitate the towels enough to get the gooey pooh off.  This method works very well, and I can empty the dirty water from the bucket in the compost pile or down the drain, then refill it with cold water until the water is no longer changes color. Then I feel safe in washing the towels in my machine with a little bleach and laundry detergent.  I rinse them twice after that to get the soap and bleach smell off, and I don't use any fabric softener since I don't know if that would cause any respiratory issues for the chicks. It has been a little extra work, but I feel it is worth it if we don't lose any chicks this year. 

We are getting ready now to change over to wood shavings this next week. 

Here are some photos of two of the chicks, today, at 11 days of age.

 The first one figured out how to fly to the ledge of the little container I put them in while cleaning out the brooder each day. So, obviously, we have to keep a covering (I use a spread out baby gate) over the brooder. In some of the photos, you can see the little feathers coming in for the wings and tail. ;)  The last photo is a bit more blurry. More often than not, they move much too quick for me and my camera speed with a blur as a result. She is standing on some poster board and based on my hand being there, you can tell she's still pretty small, but has grown over the past week. She's our little blond one. 

No ID

My idea of using different color rubber bands on the chicks' ankles did not work out well. We tried one each on four of the chicks to watch the interaction. First, the babies would peck at their own little bands and literally pull themselves right off their own little feet! Other babies would chase them around trying to eat the bands. So we clipped the bands off, and back to the drawing board.  We might try later. But for now, we will think on ways of telling them apart.

The meal worms are still pretty tiny, so I pulled out about 20 very small worms and fed them to the babies. Now, that was cute! One of the chicks ate more than her fill! She would grab a meal worm and run to a corner of the box to eat her treat then quickly run back and grab another.

Last night was hard boiled egg yolk mashed into tiny pieces. That was not quite as big a hit as the meal worms, but some of them did enjoy that treat.

The warmer is working well for the babies. No pasty bottoms. 

This afternoon, I held all the chicks on my lap in our first "social" gathering. We only spent five minutes because they were climbing all over each other and I didn't want any injuries. Hopefully, as each day goes by, they calm down. It is interesting to see that they are already, at only a few days old, forming a hierarchy! 

It was a good day.

New Baby Russian Orloff Chick Chicks First Day Home

The babies have arrived. We were not the only ones who put in the order for Russian Orloff's this year. It was suggested by the feathered friend lady to grind up the baby mash a little finer for the first week, so we put it into the blender and let it break down into almost powder. As soon as they arrived, I dipped their little beaks into the water with electrolytes already in it. After a few minutes, they all ran to the "warmer" at the opposite end of the brooder and crowded under it like they would a momma hen. They spend a lot of time under the warmer, but take five to ten minute breaks venturing out for the food and water. We are going to use towels as their floor for the first few weeks until they are bigger and more hearty before putting in the wood shavings. I'm getting ready to hard boil an egg to mash up and feed to them. Here they are.

The Mealy Worm Adventure

Last Summer, we attempted to start producing our own meal worms. It was an epic failure because we had purchased (we think anyways) hormone treated "extra large" meal worms from the local pet store.  Later, we read that the giant worms are made that way with with a growth hormone that causes the resulting beetles to be sterile (non-fertile).  So we ultimately threw out the dead beetles and started over. We had not fed any of these worms to our chickens.

August, we purchased a small container of  "small" meal worms and tried again. By November, the beetles were practically swarming the container. For two months, we watched the beetles mating and burrowing through the "food" but never saw any baby worms hatching out.... Back to the drawing board. We thought we had again purchased sterile worms.  I finally found a website that explained that the beetles, if left un-attended in the main container, will eat all the worms as they are starting to grow as well as any pupae. 

The end of December, I pulled out all the beetles in the container and fed them "LIVE" to the chickens.  We were careful to make certain that none "escaped." (There is more about the potential issues of these beetles infesting a chicken coop, later in this post.) I had hoped that we would have enough eggs left over in the container to keep going. Literally, we ended up with 7 worms left from the beetles' feeding frenzy.  By the end of February, the larvae grew up, morphed into pupae and then into beetles.

As soon as the light golden brown beetles started to turn up in the container, I pulled them out and, one by one, put them into a small "deli soup container" and let them breed. I had poked small holes into the lid of the container, put a handful of wheat bran, two handfuls of steel-cut oats into the bowl with the beetles, along with a small piece of paper towel and a small fresh piece of cut carrot on top of the oatmeal.

Here's what I learned. The paper towel will absorb some of the moisture from the cut carrot but as the carrot shrivels up the paper towel will stay moist for a few more days. Under that paper towel is where the majority of the tiny worms will gravitate. I put in fresh paper towel and carrot slices twice a week. Also with the paper towel and twice weekly change out of carrot helps prevent mold and mildew from forming in the oatmeal while keeping some moisture in the container for the various stages of the worms.

Put four to six beetles into a small container with wheat bran, old-fashioned or steel-cut oats and the small carrot on the small piece of paper towel, and let them go at it for a week or so.  Take the beetles out of the container (I put them in a small jar) and dump the contents of that small container into a larger container with more oats and bran to allow the eggs to hatch and continue the cycle. Personally, I recommend killing the beetles after what I read about the potential of them infesting places. It sounds like they can spread diseases if allowed to "run free" and there are some articles about chicken farms in the south that have had real issues with Darkling Beetle. Read more about these infestation issues at this University of Georgia page.While I don't literally smash the beetles, I put them into a jar in my freezer and throw them away after a day. When I feed live meal worms to my chickens, I watch to make certain that all the worms are consumed. (That would be hard to do if we had a large-scale operation.) Using a slick sided bowl makes it harder for the worms to escape before being consumed. But, you can freeze and dry the worms for use, also, which will prevent any chance of an infestation.

Also, I learned NOT to purchase "mature" or large or giant meal worms from the pet store; not that I will need to purchase any more, at this rate.

I discovered that if I keep the beetles separated from the grubs, I have better meal worm output. The meal worms develop better/faster in a humid environment, so I decided to keep them in my laundry room. While I have not had any problems with mold/mildew in the container, I found out that if that occurs, it's a lot of work to clean out the container in order to save the grubs. Also, when the larvae pupate, you can gently take the pupae out and put them into separate areas, like a small plastic box with many sections so that, as they change into beetles, the remaining pupae do not get eaten by the new beetles. Also, you will need to dig through the food/substrate to look for pupae and/or beetles.  It's amazing how quickly they can develop in the right conditions.

The larger grubs are just a treat that our chickens LOVE. This is not intended to be their main meal. I can also put out worms for wild birds and, if necessary, I can probably give them away to wild bird enthusiasts if I end up with too many meal worms. 

When I grow my own meal worms, I know that the grubs have eaten. I know that the beetles are in a clean space, that the larvae are clean and that my birds are less likely to be infected with anything because, from start to finish, the meal worms were raised in a clean environment.

Springing into Orloff Season

Lots of behind the scenes activities during the winter month. Planning two new coops. One coop will be mobile, similar to the first ark we built. We are currently building a different type of A-Frame that will contain our pullets that we can pull around in our pastured backyard. We have plans to build a stationary coop and run over cement in a protected area for winter. This time, we are planning on building electrical outlets "inside" the coops for easier heat and lighting.

We put in an order for 10 baby chicks and they should arrive on Friday (we hope). We have a large brooder for the first few weeks and an extra large brooder as the chicks start to grow. We are hoping for a better survival rate, but are expecting a 50% survival. We've changed a few things. One of the issues we had last time was the chicks eating the wood shavings. Instead of wood shavings at the onset, we are going to use large thin towels that we can wash. We have four, so we can wash a Bucket load every three days and rotate the towels over a two or three week time period before we switch to the wood shavings.

We have some other changes in place. We will be using a Brinsea Chick Warming system this time so that we don't have to work so hard to regulate the temps in the brooder with a 250 watt heating lamp suspended over the coop. The warmer is large enough for up to 20 chicks, so we should be good with 10. We have a different chick feeder that will be more difficult for the chicks to stand on (we hope) and we will be using Organic chick feed by Payback. We are HOPING that these changes, collectively, will make a difference in survival rates.

I picked up some tiny latex color bands (the type little girls use in their hair) to mark the chicks. I'll put a different color around each chick's little leg and the bands are easy to clip off as they grow older. I'm just hoping that they won't "eat" the little bands. The bands are so tiny, I doubt that it would hurt them, if they do eat the bands. This is just an experiment to see if this will work as an adequate tracking system for individual socialization time and record keeping of their growth.

We have a chick water system already. We have the electrolytes and the pro-biotics ready for use from the onset. We will be hard boiling eggs so that we can feed the chicks a little bit of yolk every day. We have a portable table to put the brooder on so that the pets and grandkids can't pester and stress the chicks. We will use a fully extended baby gate to cover the brooder for added security and to prevent the chicks from flying out as they get older. I bleached/washed 20 small cotton towels that we use to hold the chicks on our laps for short periods of time to socialize them during the first few weeks while keeping them warm and feeling safe.

All in all, I think we are ready to go, and I hope that this is a good year for new chicks.

Sprung Spring and More Daylight

After the super cold dry winter we had, the rains are here and the grass is getting green. The chicks are in the stores now. It's amazing how many people go to the farm stores just to see the babies!

We put in a special order for chicks that should be arriving the last part of March. So we are gearing up for baby chicks; building a new coop, cleaning up the brooder, ordered an EcoGlow for brooder heat.

I'm working on trying to design a different waterproof feeder. The two-tiered feeder we are using now in the coop works fine, as is, but the next coop we are building will need a different system. If the feeder pans out as planned, I'll be certain to post pictures.

We changed out the red low-wattage heat lamp with a soft pink night light. Having a light source all night seems to help them feel safer. There's not a lot of ambient lighting at night in our backyard, and I'm hoping that the light discourages predators who like the darkness.

The girls are doing really good. They are loving the warmer weather and all the new bugs. Although the coyotes have been close by, they seem to be staying away from the coop. We don't seem to be having too much problem with mice or other little critters. I think the fact that we move the coop each week has been helpful with that.

So far, the eggs have been a big hit with family and friends. Several people have started purchasing the fresh eggs and rave about the flavor. I think the fact that the girls always have fresh pasture and bugs, contributes to the great taste.