Chickens in the Living Room

Indeed! There are 16 young Barred Rocks in our living room, as it is snowing outside. Already we are 100 inches over the average snowfall for the year. Will it ever stop? Is spring coming this year??? Can't spare the space in the barn...we need it for lambing, so we must brood our chicks inside.

Typically, our hens raise the chicks around here, but this year we are adding a new breed, so we started from hatchery stock. Having been around this block before, I did not succumb to the darling day old chicks - but waited for them to become awkward, gangly feathered creatures. Cute gets its mileage, yes, but the practicality of older chicks wins hands down for this farm girl. They are not as likely to "expire" as day olds, have alreday eaten a couple of weeks of food on someone else's tab, and are a bit more "thermoregulated" so the temperature fluctuation is not such a challenge in this old, drafty house whose wood furnace runs cold in the middle of the night.

Have learned a bit from experience. This year, and if-ever after, I am brooding in a wire rabbit cage, with the removeable tray. All of the mess falls through the floor to the shredded newspaper...and they haven't been able to pollute the water! Other than the bundles of chick fluff that accumulates like cottonwood tufts around the room - they've been no trouble at all. In fact, their incessant peeping and scampering is becoming quite endearing, now that there is no mess that results from them, and I might even miss them when they make the move to the great outdoors!