It’s chick time again! I used to get my chicks at Tractor Supply, but they do first come, first served and a lot more people are buying chicks in the past few years than there used to be, so now I’m ordering them from the feed store over in the county seat. This year I got four Rhode Island reds; regular readers know I rotate the colors to make it easy to keep track of their ages (because chickens only lay for 2-3 years). Technically, last year should’ve been reds, but at the time I still had two reds and only one white, so I got whites last year (and the last one died a few months ago). Our last red died just recently, so it worked out almost perfectly; next year should be some dark color, though these blacks turned out to be disappointing layers, so I’ll need to do a little research on which dark-colored breeds lay as well as the reds and whites. But one way or the other, chick season always makes me smile every time I go into the bathroom where they live, and sometimes when it’s quiet I can hear their peeping through a closed door and all the way in the living room.
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Boring but necessary legal stuff
I’m retired from the post office. People order chicks (and ducklings) and they go through the postal system. Apparently they can live for a few days without food after hatching. If you look in the box and the peepers are doing their thing. Ducklings look back at you with a pitiful look. The boxes are treated like Express mail and go directly to a station or small town PO. People mail roosters too. Yes, they’re crowing at 4 AM on a very busy loading dock.
Yes, for about 3 days after hatching they’re still living on the yolk sac. So they mail them as soon as they hatch out and are sexed, and they survive on the yolk until their destination.