CHICK SUPPLIES CHECKLIST 101 | What You Need PRIOR To Buying Baby Chickens | BACKYARD POULTRY CARE

what's up guys welcome back to oak abode you guys have been so helpful in sending us messages regarding what kind of videos you want to see and we got a lot of messages that people wanted to see kind of how to check videos so today i'm going to do a really basic video on the kind of setup that we use to raise our chick i'm gonna go through a lot of kind of the novice mistakes people make i made some of them myself um freya is very excited because she loves baby chicks she loves taking care of them and she smells all the chick stuff and she thinks there's chicks in there not yet hon so we are gonna get a few more chicks in a few weeks but in the meantime like i said i'm just gonna go over everything we get set up before we bring chicks home as usual everything is already linked in a blog post on our website so if you guys prefer to read instead of watch just click the link in the description and that will take you to the list of this whole cheeky checklist as i call it but if you want to see it on video i'm also just going to go through each item how i set it up and some of them how i clean it before we bring new babies in as well so the first thing i'm going to talk about is the chick brooder and if you are brand new to chicks you might get a little bit confused by some of the terminology most people call what the whole container that the chickens stay in the chick brooder but there's also a radiant heat brooder which is separate from the brooder that i'll talk about there are a lot of different things you can use as the chick housing or the chick brooder what i like to use is a plastic tub i think this one's 27 gallons i'm gonna link everything for you guys below we use just kind of these storage bins i like using plastic storage bins i have used cardboard boxes before and the main reason was because they were bigger and they were cheaper um but chicks make wet messes no matter how many times you prop up their water they are going to knock it down it's still kind of soaked through made a great big mess i know a lot of people will use those galvanized metal tubs and i think those are probably fine too i know like tractor supply and a lot of feed stores use those if you're going to use those i will say be very careful if you're going to use those and a heat lamp i will never use a heat lamp again with my chicks i'll talk about that more in a second but i know a lot of people have killed their ticks by having those galvanized metal tubs and putting their heat lamps too close and they just roast them they have no way to get away from the heat so certain containers are going to have more risks and be a little more difficult to finagle than others i'm sure you guys have plastic bins like this laying around your house if you don't want to buy something new this is what works for us i know people are going to ask me how many chicks can fit in this size and the answer is really it depends on how often you're willing to move them as they get bigger this year we're only going to get three chicks i'm saying that now and i'm pretty sure but if i fall in love we'll get more and this is about the size that i would recommend for three chicks when we got our first set of chicks i had 12 and i put six in two bins this size and it was uh it was a little cozy especially when they got bigger so um i always say the bigger the bin you have the better it's a lot harder to have a bin that is too big than it is uh to have a bin that is too small so if you're trying to decide between a smaller band and a bigger bin i would usually go with the bigger one okay next thing i want to talk about is the radiant heat chick breeder mine is really messy from last year it's covered in sawdust so i'm gonna clean it off this is the chip rooter and this is what we use instead of a heat lamp and i'm gonna get on my soapbox for one minute um most people are gonna use heat lamps when they get baby chicks i did the first time i had chicks and i was never comfortable with it most safety recommendations say to never leave a heat lamp unattended and so i was really nervous um because you you can't always be watching baby chicks as you're sleeping as you're going places it's not possible so three reasons i will never use a heat lamp again number one they're a fire hazard uh especially when feathers are involved it's one thing when you have a heat lamp in like a reptile tank but chickens have down feathers that float around and every year on like local chicken groups on facebook there's always at least one person who reports a heartbreaking coup fire or house fire that was supposedly started by a heat lamp the radiant heat brooders are supposed to be a lot safer in my opinion it's just not worth the risk i know people are going to say they've used heat lamps and they've been fine that's your prerogative it was constantly in the back of my mind i was always worrying i never felt right leaving the heat lamps on in those chicks especially the beginning they need them on all the time so number one they are a fire risk number two it's a lot easier to kill your chicks with heat lamps than it is with the radiant heat brooders and this isn't sponsored we paid for this but if you've ever watched baby chicks with mama hen basically they just kind of dart in and out from underneath her they're kind of used to this on off switch they understand when they're cold they go and warm up and when they're too hot or when they want to go explore they go and they just head on out they are really good at regulating their own body temperature from pretty much day one the difference is that with mama hen it's like an on off switch and when you have a heat lamp it's more of a heat gradient so the chicks for the most part will eventually learn that the closer they are the heat lamp the hotter it is so it's not to say that it won't work for a lot of people myself it worked okay but a lot of people will find that their chicks are panting or they are actually having chicks die because their heat lamp is too close or the heat lamp is too far away and they don't know it and the chicks are freezing so there's a lot more room for user air when you're using a heat lamp whereas with the radiant heat brooder they do it just like they would with momma head they just go under it when they're cold and then they come out when they're warm in my opinion there's a lot less to screw up there finally third reason that i will always use a radiant heat brooder instead of a heat lamp is because i believe all babies no matter the species should be able to feel safe and comforted and the radiant heat brooder is a lot more like a mama hen where it's dark it's cozy they'll snuggle up with each other under there if they're scared they go to this dark warm place and they'll feel a lot safer so i think mentally emotionally it's better for these babies and if you guys have ever raced birds before you know that stress can be a big killer of birds we've been really fortunate to never have a chick die on us but especially if you have a chick who's sick who's fighting for their life you never know the difference it might make to have a warm cozy dark place where they can feel very safe that's kind of my soapbox about heat lamps i think the reason that most people use them is just because they don't realize that there are better options it's just kind of what people have been doing for decades and now we have the radiant brooders we got ours from our local feed mill it's fine it works okay i don't necessarily recommend this one because it's kind of like a snapping system to move this platform lower or higher i already broke one of the snaps because it's kind of hard to finagle and figure out um so i linked some below for you guys that are like they seem like they're kind of like a screw system which seems a lot easier to change um if you guys want to try those once this one goes out if it ever goes out that's probably what we'll get instead so the next thing you're going to need obviously is chick food i just picked this bag up at tractor supply we do like to get the medicated chick food which is supposed to help against hooks whatever that basically when we look for a chick food we look for a starter grower um so it's it's the same stuff that you would feed meat birds usually if you are getting meat birds too the key is that it has a high protein content and it's not going to be fortified with extra calcium like the grown-up adult layer feed is if you're getting egg layers so the reason you don't want to feed them that when they're too young is because since they're not laying eggs yet supposedly the calcium can build up in their system and it's not good for them pretty hard to go wrong this bag will not last long when we pick up our chicks we're gonna get a giant bag from the uh actual feed store that we usually go to but you can order it online if you don't live near a local feed store all right next i want to show you guys the feeder and water so but basically this is how the feeder and water works you have your canister which is the same for both food and water and then you're gonna have a base so this is gonna be the food base uh it's got these little holes for that for them to get the food and then this is gonna be the water base it uses kind of a suction system so that um the water just funnels down from the canister and goes into this little ring here a lot of them are red because people like to teach the chickens that red signifies food or water especially if you're planning on transitioning to like a nipple drinker i will say we've tried the nipple drinkers for chicks and for adult chickens in the past we don't really like them number one because we have a chicken with crosby and she can't drink from the nipple drinkers efficiently so um we need to take care of her so that's a no for us but number two for the chicks we're just not really comfortable with how long it took the chicks to figure it out i know eventually they'll figure it out and they'll be fine but it was a little uncomfortable for us to watch them kind of frantic the other thing is that the nipple drinker just constantly dripped water onto the bedding so i don't know if that was just the one that we had or what but i just find it easier to kind of use the traditional feeder and water if you're brand new to chickens one thing really important to note is that you want to make sure this water is level usually we'll prop it up with a block of wood or something something not too high that the chicks can't get to it but two things are gonna happen one the chicks are gonna kick their shavings into the water and it's gonna make a mess so i just kind of a few times throughout the day just go in and scoop out the shavings they kick in there even if it's elevated it still happens they get really excited with their kicking it's adorable but it's super annoying and the other thing is especially as they get bigger they're gonna start knocking it over and it's so annoying but it's just like that's why i wasn't gonna have chicks this year they they do get really really annoying as cute as they are but if you can find a way especially if you have like a bigger brooder to set it up so that they can't fly on top of it and knock it over let me know because um this will be our fourth season raising chicks and it gets a little bit easier but never gets totally easy cheeky cheeky cheeky checklist the next thing i want to talk about is chick grits this is a little bit controversial in the chicken world whether chicks need grit or not i went ahead and bought it for you guys because i want to show you what it looks like so if you're brand new to chickens sorry if this is like basic info for some of you more advanced chicken people but if you're brand new to chickens chicks meat chick chickens and chicks need to eat basically little rocks so things that they are not going to completely digest and that are going to sit in their gizzard i don't think it's their crop i think it's their gizzard leave a comment below if you're a chicken digestion expert but basically these rocks sit in their digestive system and it's kind of the substitution for teeth because they don't chew so when they eat food it goes down pretty much whole and then these rocks grind it up and they can digest it so we don't supply grit to our grown up hens because they free range most of the time so they can find their own grit pecking at the soil and picking up rocks and who knows what else sticks however are kept indoors and especially if you have chickens that you're keeping in a really confined area where they don't have access to grit you might need to supply grit too this is different from oyster shells oyster shells are not grit they will break oyster shells down for calcium totally separate most chicken places will tell you that you need to get chick grit so that they have access to little rocks to help them break down food a lot of people say that chick food is made so that they can digest it without needing grit and and therefore grit is not actually necessary unless you're introducing different foods like treats vegetables that kind of thing which doesn't happen till later usually we're the kind of people who are like i don't think that's actually that necessary um but we do add grit to our chick food mainly because chicks will pick at the bedding that is in the brooder so some people say the grit is kind of like an extra layer of defense if they are going to pick at the paper towels or the bedding in the brooder and that it prevents things like sauerkraut or impacted crop it just is supposed to be a layer of protection so all that to say i know some people are gonna get triggered that i'm mentioning grit and they're gonna say it's not necessary for us frankly i don't care if you give your chicks grit or not i'm just letting you know that we do it's just kind of an added layer of protection in my mind it's five bucks and it's not gonna hurt them so we just sprinkle a little bit on their food i'll show you guys how we do that in a little bit all right the next thing i want to talk about is electrolytes so we use sav a chick i think it's supposed to be save a chick it's spelled savagic and these are electrolytes that we put in their water in the water like this then we fill it with water uh whenever we bring chicks home right away so we don't put it in their water for more than a few days usually maybe a week don't quote me on this this is just our experience definitely follow the directions on any of these items i'm mentioning but especially if you are getting mail order chicks it's a really rough journey and we actually don't get mail-order chicks anymore because it's just kind of that's what i did the first time i ordered chicks and we got really lucky we ordered 10 chicks and we got 12 out of 10 we're all healthy we didn't lose a single one there's a lot of stuff that can happen out of your control if the usps system is delayed which especially recently it has been a lot i've heard stories of hundreds if not thousands of chicks dying just because they their boxes get stuck and they sit so i'm not going to tell you guys not to order mail order chicks i am gonna say i started getting chicks at our local feed mill where they hatch a lot of their chicks themselves there's also usually local breeders or hatcheries that you can look into i think maybe this year we'll try a local hatchery because that way you don't have live babies that are going without food or water for three days i know a lot of them survive but very stressful on them so anyway your mail ordering especially important is that they have these extra electrolytes they're supposed to help them rejuvenate their systems hydrate them better because they've gone three days basically without water i'm not gonna get preachy but i am just gonna say um whether you're getting chicks mail order or you're picking them up locally i like to use these for the first few days just because it's stressful they're going through a lot of changes they're new to the world they need a little help with their little bodies oh okay i had to go get more stuff next thing i'm going to talk about seriously they're like this big i don't know why they're so make him get a little complicated all right the next thing that i have on my cheeky checklist list is you should have paper towels so you probably don't need to go out and buy this but i did think it's important to note that a lot of people recommend not putting in bedding right when you get day-old baby chicks so the concern is that day old baby chicks especially when you get them in the mail don't yet know what their food is and what it looks like and they don't have a mama hand to teach them so you don't really want to put shavings or like bedding that they can pick at and eat at the bottom right at the beginning you want to give them a few days to figure out what their food is looks like tastes like etc so we use paper towels at the bottom of our chick housing a lot of people also recommend not using newspaper even though you'll see some people using newspaper it's not great for the chicks for two reasons one is because there's a lot of chemicals and dyes in newspaper it's not great for the chicks is it gonna poison them and kill them i don't know but if you're trying to raise organic eggs then what's the point in that but number two the biggest reason is that newspaper is kind of slippery and the chicks can slip and their little legs are so fragile that it can cause injuries or even growth deformities if they're not walking right so i'm a big proponent of paper towels what we usually do is put a couple layers down and then like once or twice during the day we'll come in and just put a new layer on top so you don't necessarily have to clean it all out a few times a day but we do like to cover up depending on how poopy it's getting so really easy to do and really easy to clean out i don't know what the exact amount of time that you should use paper towels instead of bedding is if you want you can ask on backyardchickens.com if you ask 10 people you'll probably get 10 different answers i will tell you that we use the paper towels for usually like four days to a week probably um and then we start adding in the bedding all right speaking of bedding i brought my tractor supply flake bedding it's the regular flake not the fine flake okay i'm putting this down you can use whatever bedding is easiest to get your hands on i recommend something not very dusty and if you guys watch our other videos you know that we recommend fine flakes for adult chickens because we use the deep litter method and it breaks down a little bit quicker that way but for baby chicks i don't want smaller pieces because i don't want to encourage them to eat it so we use the regular flake budding for our baby chicks the main thing is you don't want anything super dusty you don't want anything very aromatic or that has a lot of oils like cedar shavings my birds have really sensitive respiratory systems especially babies so usually pine pine flake is the way to go when we bring home our new chicks in a few weeks we're gonna put out a new video which is more like how we take care of them and with everything set up so if you guys haven't already subscribed make sure you hit the subscribe button if you are interested in seeing kind of everything here in action all right i'm gonna break my own advice and i'm gonna tell you guys that you need to get a housing cover for before the chicks start flying which we don't have yet don't use the lid that comes with these containers by the way you'll suffocate your chicks so what's gonna happen is your chicks are gonna start to fly chickens do fly and your chicks are gonna start to fly they love to explore and they're going to jump up on the edges and then they're going to jump out and they're not going to know how to get back in take it from experience you will have chicks walking around your house before you know it if you don't have a cover from day one they can't jump out from day one but it's crazy how fast they do learn to jump out it doesn't have to be super heavy it doesn't necessarily have to lock on okay come here oh you back talk after you put mom in between you and me yeah so it doesn't necessarily have to click on just for keeping the chicks in unless you're trying to keep like kids out or other animals out so in the past what we've used is just like a layer of hardware cloth not even like securing it or anything which i don't really recommend um but just as long as there's a lot of airflow and i do recommend that plenty of light can get in too i think it's important the chickens have daylight and nighttime so this year i'm gonna ask my incredible handy husband to just make like a frame a wood frame and then um we're just gonna put the hardware cloth inside the frame and hopefully that uh will be a more organized way of doing it than we've done in the past i do not recommend poultry wire or chicken wire for chicks specifically because they can get their heads stuck in them they can get their body stuck in them the holes are not a good size for chicks so if you're gonna use something to put on top instead of chicken wire i would recommend like a thing with smaller openings like hardware mesh or hardware cloth that kind of thing okay now we're gonna get into things that are less necessary but i still really recommend having um i know some people are gonna get triggered that i use stuff like this for my chicks but it's gonna always click out if it's triggering okay so the first thing i recommend is a carrier like a cat carrier like this one which is also so dirty before i made this video i was like i'm going to show myself cleaning all this stuff and it's going to be a great video that's going to be dumb so i probably won't do that but the reason i recommend a carrier is because if you're like me you're going to want to take your chicks outside as soon as it is warm enough for them and i swear they're like popcorn like i used to put them in a little plastic plant pot when they're really little and carrying them outside that worked like once and then instantly they just started like popping out like popcorn so i would like try and put one in and then put another one and it'll pop out so i'd be shoving like lids on top and just trying to hold them in and then like throw them outside it was hectic so as soon as we started using the cat carrier it got a lot easier obviously make sure it's cleaner than mine but that way you can put a chip kind of far back in there and usually it's easier to get them all in close the door latch it i would recommend putting a few layers of paper towel on the bottom if it's slippery especially so that they don't hurt their little legs and also it catches any mess but seriously just having a carrier to bring them in and out makes life so much easier i linked one below but you guys probably have one laying around already next thing that is more optional but still highly recommended is an outdoor play pen i'll link the one that we got this is what it looks like just sort of folds this is half of the play pen um you do have to be careful because the openings sometimes are bigger than baby chicks i think in our history the chicks have always been bigger than the opening by the time that they were ready to go outside that's in the one that we use but definitely make sure you check whatever play pen you're using i do recommend a playpen instead of their run for two reasons one because it should be portable because wherever they're having their exploration time should have both shade and sun and you should bring their food and water out there too and not be outside for too long and not leave them unattended and yada yada but i like to move the pen depending on the time of day so that i make sure there's both shade and sun wherever we're going to be sitting i like to make sure it's big enough that i can sit in there with them because the more time you spend with them is chicks the more comfortable they're going to be with you as adults as well and a lot of people's chicken runs are not built for like being able to stand up in so if it is a chicken size run and you put those babies in there they're gonna run away and they're not gonna come back so they're gonna go in the far corner they're not going to want to come inside so i really recommend just like a simple play pen you can set up sit down with them i made that mistake the first time i put chicks in the chicken run that we had built for them and yeah i was calling in my hands and knees to try and get them back the next thing on my list again kind of optional i don't have it on hand to show you but soaked feed treats so when chicks are babies they're only supposed to have their kickstarter grower food and when i first got chicks i was all into this thing called fermenting chicken feed if you are curious about it you can look into it it ended up being way more trouble than it's worth and i don't think i think it's pretty overrated but i did find that chicks are obsessed with fermented feed or even just feed that is like soaked and just kind of like mash instead of crumbles it's the exact same stuff that they were eating but what i would do is i would just soak it in water for a few hours make sure you're doing it safely read up on it first you want to make sure that the water is completely covering the feed and it's not moldy and it has just like a gentle fermented smell read up on it before you do it but basically i found that it didn't even have to ferment all it had to do was soak and the chicks food go crazy for it so i have a video on my instagram by day three it was like they were three or four days old and i would just stick my hand in and i would say here girls which is still how i call them and they would run to my hand and they'd be crawling all over it and pecking just this like soggy mash food and i swear that first batch of chicks that i got to date are the tamest adult chickens that i have and i know it's because i spent so much time with them as babies but also i think having these like treats and training them that my hands were something to be excited about and something to run to not something to run away from they would just hop up in my hand and i would hold them that way and to this day they're like they're like dogs it's honestly kind of weird but if you want your chickens to be tame soaked feed treats because they can't have actual treats yet that's a good way to get them to love you early on and finally the last thing i linked for you guys below is chick toys and chick roosts so roofs are kind of like the little things that they can stand on so they can get a little bit higher up i don't have any show you because we don't use these ourselves i always recommend joining local chicken groups on social media for your area for the best advice and i always feel like a horrible chicken mom because some of the chicks have the sickest chick cribs like they have everything and a lot of people like to deck out the chick housing with roosts and with mirrors and with bird toys and if you want to do that that's something that uh could also be on your list potentially full disclosure we don't really do that with our chicks so i work from home and i love animals i love spending time with them i love bonding with them so what i like to do is take the carrier take them outside and let them act like normal chickens outside as soon as they are safe to do so so for that reason as long as weather is good usually they're going out a couple times a day and they're they're crazy when they're out there they're popcorning i call it where they flap and they freak out and they have the best time and then as soon as they come inside they're like sacked they are just literally face in the bedding sleeping so our chicks get plenty of entertainment just from their outdoor trips but especially if you're not able to take your chicks outside it is actually pretty important to have some forms of mental exercise if your chicks are too crowded and or if they're too bored they will start picking on each other and causing injuries so you want to make sure they're not bored if you want to get roosts and you want to get toys that is another option too whoa okay so i hope that covers everything i honestly never realized there was so much that goes into getting ready for baby chicks like i said i'm gonna post a video in a few weeks when we get our baby chicks with kind of a more organized kind of this is how we take care of baby chicks and answering a lot of those questions about when are chicks old enough to go outside i'll give you a hint it's not about age it's more about the temperature outside combined with their age how do you know when they're old enough to have treats how do you know when to move them to the coop full time i'm going to answer kind of those questions in that video but if you guys can't wait until then or if you already have baby chicks leave a comment below and i will do my best to either get to them or hopefully somebody else in the community can get to them too if there's anything that i left off this list that you use for your ticks please also leave a comment below because i usually forget something if you guys haven't already subscribed to our channel we would love if you would hit that subscribe button so that you can join us again in the future and if you're not already following us on instagram our instagram handle is oak underscore abode i kind of tipped people off to this list of things a few days ago so sometimes on instagram you get a little bit of a heads up if you follow us there thanks again for watching guys leave any tips tricks questions comments below we all love learning from each other otherwise we will see you in a few weeks hopefully with some new babies

Channel: Oak Abode

Views: 237,976

Keywords: how to raise baby chicks, chick care 101, backyard chicken babies day one, hatching eggs at home, poultry care tips, suburban homestead for beginners, brooder vs heat lamp, pine bedding for animals, best egg laying breeds, what to feed meat birds, mail order pets, self sustaining property, grow your own food, cleaning out cages, full grown hens, easter eggers colors, humane lifestyle, grit supplementation, oyster shell calcium, homeschool projects, supplemental coop heat

Id: QsAqU7QlM9M

Length: 26min 16sec (1576 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021