It’s all about the chicks (except the bits about the dog)

I suspect there will be many posts in which I rhapsodize about the chickens…

Today the chicks are one week old, so I got to switch their bedding from paper towel to wood chips. This is because in their first week they are still learning to recognize food, if they had wood chips for bedding, they might eat them, which would make them sick. 

This is nice for a number of reasons:

• The paper towel got very mucky very fast. The thick layer of wood chips is much more absorbent, and therefore stays cleaner, which is much better for the chicks. 
• Cleaning the bedding is easier because I can stir the dirty bedding then add a layer of clean on top for a few days, before needing to clean the whole thing out.
• The chicks scratch in the bedding (think of a cat in a litter box) and so do some of the ‘stirring’ themselves, again keeping the whole thing cleaner, more pleasant, and healthier.

However (you knew there had to be a catch). They scratch very enthousiastically. One of them was trying to dig to China, I’m sure. Which is incredibly cute, but sends the wood chips flying everywhere – including into the water font:

Within two minutes, the font was full of wet wood pulp. Not good. So my ingenious solution was to raise the water font up on a block of wood. Hopefully this will minimize the amount of bedding that ends up in the water. I’ll go and check on them in a few minutes to see.

They are growing feathers! At vastly different rates! Some of them have long wing feathers already, some still have only tiny little stubs. Some are starting to grow tail feathers (I wonder if those are the roosters?) in tiny little straggly tufts.

They are all well. There’s one I’m a little worried about, it’s smaller than the rest and seems weaker. At least one runt in 25 chicks is to be expected, however, so I’m just hoping it’s healthy and will develop normally, even if it ends up smaller than the rest.

And in Carter news: The result of last night’s vet trip is that he is out of the cast and back in the same type of splint he had when this whole debacle started. The vet is very confidant that his leg has healed enough to be safe in the splint. He is not allowed off leash outdoors, nor is he allowed to play with other dogs for another few weeks, but we’re getting there. As we were leaving the vet just after 8pm (we had the last evening appointment), they got a call saying a fellow was on his way in with two dogs, each with a face full of porcupine quills. For one of the dogs, apparently this would make the third time they have pulled quills out of his face!