Today, Monday, was the first day I had to go back to work since taking on the responsibility of the chicks and ducklings. As you can probably see from the title of the blog, the chicks and ducks are fun, sure, but they are also part of a larger experiment to see if I can actually be successful as a homesteader, and maybe eventually full-time farmer. I learned a few things about tending to chicks and ducks today: most importantly, that it takes a lot of time to clean up after the messy, messy, smelly, ducks, and I appreciate having someone to help out.
Cleaning out the chicks' bin is a snap. The hardest part is moving all 16 chickens from the brooder into a cardboard box so that I can clean out the brooder. It's getting harder too, since they're getting bigger and quicker. Occasionally they turn around and peck at my hands, so I've been trying to take the time to hold each one long enough until it settles down in my hands before placing it in the cardboard box. I'm hoping that they will eventually learn that I am not going to harm them, and will stop freaking out when I take the lid off the brooder and try to pick them up. If I am going to be caring for them, they need to learn to chill out.
But basically the process of cleaning out the chicken brooder is:
1. move the chicks to the cardboard box
2. take out the feeder and waterer
3. roll up the dirty newspaper on the bottom
4. take the bin outside and shake out any ucky things left in the bin
5. lay down 4 or 5 pages of fresh newspaper
6. return feeder and waterer, filled if needed
7. replace chicks
The whole process takes maybe 10 minutes, and probably 7 minutes of that time is spent moving chicks from one bin to the other. All said, they're pretty easy to take care of right now, and not very time consuming. I change their bin once a day, and I've decided to do it in the evening, before the sun goes down, so that I am not rushed in the morning and so that I don't disturb their natural sleep patterns by doing it later than dusk.
I noticed that one of the chicks wasn't acting quite right as soon as I got home from work and went to clean the bins. When I walk in the room, all of them freak out a little bit, but one of them didn't. She was asleep at the wall of the brooder, and even when I tapped on the brooder near her, she didn't do more than breathe. She did not protest at all when I picked her up, force-fed her some water, and she began to act mostly normal before I could insist she eat any milky toast. I put her back in with the rest briefly, then wondered if she might be getting beat up by the bigger ones. It was only after I put her back in the brooder that I noticed how much smaller she was than the rest, and I decided to build a hospital for her for the night and isolate her just in case. I cut out the top of a tissue box, put some water in the top of a small round tupperware lid, scattered some food in there, and put the whole rig into the brooder. I figured she would either recover or die, and either way it was best she be isolated for the night.
I then turned my attention to the ducks. The ducks are very time consuming to clean up after. I decided not to take them swimming today, just because it was rainy and therefore kind of chilly, and it was a Monday and I was tired, and I didn't think they necessarily needed it, and I'd just been dealing with the sick/injured chick. I did, however, clean out their bin, also before dusk. Resetting the ducks' bin is a bit messier than is the chicks', and because of the amount of water they spill, it requires more actual cleaning. Whereas the chicks take forever to move from one bin to the cardboard box, the ducks are a snap. They are still a little afraid of me, so there is a little bit of chasing. The whole procedure takes more like 15-20 minutes, and all of the steps for cleaning out the chicks' bin are included, but there are 3 additional steps: I wash their bin out with the hose every day, add 2 inches of pine chips on top of the newspapers, and then add another layer of newspaper and tuck in the chips at the edges -- if I don't tuck it in, the ducklings eat the chips. The wood chips are pretty effective at picking up the excess water, as is the tupperware basin I rigged to sit underneath the waterer. I've found I can roll up the newspapers and chips, minimizing the mess, but it's still necessary to hose it out and carefully assemble the layers, all of which takes time.
They had all curled up together under the heat lamp (after playing in the water for a bit) before I was ready to start cleaning out the bin, so I decided to leave them alone for the night and get up early to do it in the morning.
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