dirt / By Amy Stewart

The Great Chick Shortage

First, find the damned things. Then read this.

(April 16, 2009)  In case you haven’t been to a feed store lately, I’ve got news for you: It’s chicken season. Every feed store in town has a little wire cage rigged up with heat lamps, and under those heat lamps are — nothing.

Nothing. We are in an oversold situation with regard to baby chicks this spring.

GALLERY >

Maybe it’s the economy. Maybe it’s the local food movement. Maybe it’s the fact that those baby chicks are so damn cute and you’ve been trying to resist them for years but the overwhelming force of their fluffy, downy, peeping cuteness finally overcame you. Whatever the reason, the feed stores around town are telling me that when their shipment of peeps arrive, they go out the door with loving new chicken-parents in a matter of minutes.

Now, don’t panic. You’re going to get your baby chickens, but it just might take a little strategizing. A&L Feed in McKinleyville tells me that they’re going to keep ’em coming until October. That’s right, October! As long as the raccoons are eating them, they told me, they will keep selling them. (Calm down. A raccoon is not going to eat your little Sasha and Malia or whatever you decide to call them. You’re going to build an impenetrable fortress for your girls, surrounded by sturdy hardware cloth, which will also be buried a foot or two underneath the pen so that creatures cannot climb over, reach inside, or tunnel under.)

All the other feed stores have more shipments coming in as well. Several of them seem to get their shipments on Friday, so plan your week accordingly. The Farm Store, Fortuna Feed, Nielsen and Three Gs are all expecting regular shipments throughout the spring. And in case you don’t frequent feed stores, let me tell you that they are staffed by the friendliest people you’ll ever meet. You can call them and find out what breeds they are expecting to receive and when, and you can also hit them up for chicken advice any time.

Feed stores will also have the heat lamps, pine shavings, feeders, books of nursery rhymes, adorable little chicken-sized baby bonnets and, of course, feed that you will need to get started. Okay, I’m not quite sure about the baby bonnets, and instead of a book of nursery rhymes you might rather check out their selection of helpful chicken-raising manuals, but other than that, they’ve got all that stuff. There’s some sort of powdery medication you’re supposed to put in the drinking water of baby chicks, and different kinds of food for different stages of growth, so you’ll need some help putting all that together. Do this ahead of time so that when you get home with the baby chicks, you can put them right into their new home under the heat lamp they so urgently need.

You’ll have about two months to get their outdoor coop ready, and if you’re not sure how to go about building one, I suggest that you cruise through the feed stores and take a look at the ready-made animal shelters and nesting boxes they sell. Again, I cannot stress how important it is to have an overbuilt, ultra-reinforced housing situation for your birds. We tested our coop ahead of time by locking cat food in there. In a couple of days the food was gone, and the critter who got it left a telltale tunnel for us to patch. We repeated this procedure a few times until we were certain that no one was going to get inside the coop and eat our chickens for dinner.

If you go to the Journal‘s website and type “chickens” into the search box, you’ll see a few articles on chicken-keeping from the past few years that might be helpful. I won’t repeat all that here; instead I’ll mention one aspect of raising chickens that you won’t read about much in books, and that is the issue of veterinary care.

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