Troubled times call for chickens.

Or anyway that’s what we decided a couple of weeks ago.

Looking back at past entries, I was surprised to see that it’s only been two years since we got our last batch of chicks. I don’t remember if I ever talked about it here, but we ended up sending those chicks to live on a farm nearby (not a euphemism; there’s a real farm!) after we were down to only two and they seemed like they might like more company (and we didn’t really want to deal with the potential complications of adding new chicks into an existing flock).

And then ever since then we’ve been talking about whether/when we should get more chicks. Now, looking at that picture up there of two of our new chicks, it seems very obvious that the answer to “when should we get chicks?” should always be “RIGHT NOW!” But. Tiny chicks require a lot of care, and we travel a lot.

Or, you know….we DID travel a lot. But not right now! So around week two of constant togetherness at home, the idea of a box of fluffy chicks arriving to break up the monotony started to sound like a pretty good idea.

Fortunately, we were enough ahead of the curve with this impulse to find chicks pretty easily–from what I gather, that’s gotten considerably more difficult of late, as more and more people hop on the corona-chick bandwagon. We ordered from My Pet Chicken–we’d ordered from them before (years ago) and had good luck, and it’s easy to order a small number of chicks from them (as few as three, depending on the time of year and your zip code). We ordered in mid March but scheduled the delivery for early April, because the minimum number of chicks was lower then and because the breed selection was better.

And then we waited for SO LONG. Like two whole weeks! The timing was good, though, because they arrived during our spring break week. Dave’s been very busy trying to get the hang of online teaching and having a zillion meetings since schools closed, so getting them earlier would have meant less time to hang out with chicks during their first few days.

So for people who’ve never ordered chicks before: yes, you can order chicks through the mail! They can still live off the nutrition from the yolk for the first few days after they hatch, so there’s a long enough window to get them where they’re going via express mail before they need food and water (they’re mailed when they’re a day old). We picked out all the breeds we wanted (we always try to get all different breeds so we can tell them apart–very important for naming purposes–naming chicks is my favorite!) and said we wanted all girls. Last time we got chicks locally and got all sex-linked chicks–meaning they look different from the time they hatch and you can tell males and females apart immediately. Big hatcheries have people trained to “sex” chicks, so you can order all females, but there’s only a 90% accuracy rate. Dave did the math and tells me there’s a 53% chance we don’t have any roosters. Fingers crossed! We can’t have any roosters here, but generally it’s fairly easy to give a rooster away if you need to.

And then we waited. Anxiously. Partly because these are (maybe you’ve noticed) strange times, and we were a little worried that mail ordering chicks in the time of corona would not go as smoothly as in normal times. My Pet Chicken recommends that you call your post office to give them a heads up and find out what the live chick procedure is. Sadly, our post office never, ever answers the phone. In the past when we’ve ordered chicks we’ve gotten a very early morning phone call letting us know they’ve arrived to come pick them up. So I slept very poorly the night before our chicks were due, anticipating a 6 AM phone call that, it turned out, did not come. It came at around noon instead, and Dave headed over with his face mask to the post office. Probably because of the virus, a postal worker brought the chicks right out to the car for him, so it was not quite contactless, but very low contact, anyway.

It’s always a little tense opening up a box of chicks that you know have been through quite a bit in their very short lives…but ours were all fine! We’ve mail ordered chicks three times now, and never had any that didn’t survive the trip (we did have one who didn’t seem to be in great shape and eventually died a couple of days later). I read where one of the big hatcheries says there’s around a 1% mortality rate for mail-ordered chicks, which is similar to that of chicks who aren’t mailed.

So WHY might you choose to get your chicks by mail instead of locally? I mean, right NOW it might be because you’re staying home as much as possible and don’t want to go into a store or a hatchery and expose yourself and/or the people who work there. But in normal times, I can think of two big reasons:

*Better selection: feed stores usually sell chicks in the spring, but they’re likely to only have a handful of different breeds to choose from. There’s nothing wrong with that, but we like to have a big variety ourselves.

*Easier to get sexed chicks: those aforementioned feed stores will often sell sexed chicks, but if you buy from a small local hatchery or farm you’ll probably be getting “straight run” chicks, which means that, on average, you’ll end up with half roosters. When we bought our chicks locally a couple of years ago, we went with all sex-linked breeds to avoid this problem…but that meant we didn’t have a lot of breeds to choose from.

I’ll talk about our brooder set up in a separate post (I’m really happy with it!) but for now I’ll introduce you to our adorable chicks. We picked a mix of breeds we’ve had before and liked (Buff Orpington and White Leghorn) and ones that are new to us but sounded intriguing. It’s important to note that our chicks are the smartest and most beautiful chicks in the whole world.

Oh, also: we decided on a National Parks theme for their names, since we can’t go to actual National Parks right now. There are six chicks and six of us, so everyone got to name one chick after a National Parks Service unit (Abe went with a Canadian park, but the rest are US).

Cuyahoga the Buff Orpington:

Our first Buff Orpington was named Nedcy, and she was a very sensible chicken.

Fundy (we think) the Super Blue Egg Layer:

We’re a having a very hard time determining which chick is the white leghorn and which is the Super Blue Egg Layer, but this is our best guess. I read that Super Blues are generally a cross between a white leghorn and a blue egg laying breed, though, so it makes sense that they look a lot alike.

Jazz (we think) the white leghorn:

White leghorns lay tons and tons of eggs, but they also have a reputation for being skittish and flighty. We had a white leghorn named Super before, though, and she was very friendly and even went broody regularly, apparently unaware that she was supposed to have had every bit of maternal instinct bred out of here. So we’re trying another one.

Mesa Verde the Olive Egger:

green eggs! Fun!

Smoky the Light Brahma:

Look carefully–she has fuzzy legs!

Tupelo the Mottled Houdan:

Tupelo is a ridiculous looking little chick who will grow up to be a ridiculous looking chicken, and she has the biggest personality so far. If you look at the pic of the chicks in their box as soon as we opened it, you can see that she’s right in front, looking all around while the others are still huddled together in a heap. She’s the littlest one, but she likes to stand up on her tiptoes and then sometimes she loses her balance, as you can see.

And there they are! Definitely bringing some cheeriness to our time at home. Hope all of you are staying well and finding some ways to brighten up these less-than-bright days!

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