Driving Across State Lines to Pick Up Chicks
Imprinting and the Mysterious Workings of a Bird’s Brain
Item in today’s news: After 15 years, the US Fish and Wildlife Service is ending its whooping crane migration program. You know about this program – it has been in the news frequently because of its noble cause; saving whooping cranes from extinction – and because of its quirkiness; people wearing crane costumes, manipulating crane puppets, and leading migrating cranes with ultralight aircraft. Everybody loved this program – everybody but the cranes, evidently. It has not been very successful.
The program had very good
success in hatching cranes, raising the babies, and teaching them to migrate. The cranes in the program also successfully
formed bonded pairs, mated, and laid eggs.
It was after that when things fell apart. The cranes frequently leave their nests and
often never return. They are simply bad
parents.
Bird behavior is a combination
of innate instinct and learned behavior.
It has become obvious that these birds raised by people in crane
costumes are missing out on important lessons on how to be good parents that
they would normally learn from other cranes.
The new approach will be to
have captive cranes raise the babies and limit human intervention as much as
possible. The failure of this program underscores
the importance of imprinting in baby birds.
So what, exactly, is
imprinting? Remember Yakky Doodle, the adorable Hanna-Barbera baby duck? Yakky’s
question to everybody he encountered was, “Are
you my mama?” And that is exactly
the question every baby bird asks - although only Yakky asks the question out
loud in English. Basically, a baby bird
decides the first moving object it sees is its mom. Obviously, it is really more complicated than
this, but if you remember that, you’ve got the basics of imprinting.
The ancient Chinese made use
of this phenomenon by imprinting freshly hatched baby ducks on a special
stick. The owner of the flock of ducks
could lead the entire flock to the fields each day and back home each night to
the duck pens simply by carrying that stick!
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| The Legbar Quints know who their mama is. |
Scientists didn’t delve into
the study of imprinting in birds until the early 20th Century. One of the pioneers was the Austrian
scientist Konrad Lorenz,
who won a Nobel Prize for his work in 1973.
Lorenz discovered that if he raised graylag geese from the time they
hatched in the absence of adult geese, they would decide that he was their
mom. They would follow him around
everywhere he went and when they became adults would actually court him. Konrad believed that the object baby birds
encounter is somehow indelibly stamped into their brains. The German term “Stamping” was translated to
the English “Imprinting.”
Most baby chicks are hatched
in an incubator and raised under heat lamps.
Thus, most of the millions of chickens alive today think that humans are
their moms. The Legbar babies now living in my coop know to the core of their little
bird hearts that Courtney the Silkie is their mom. And she has unhesitatingly adopted them as
her own chicks. We have a new and happy
little family here at the ranch! In my next post I’ll talk about last weekend’s saga of driving across state lines to pick up chicks, and I’ll also share some pictures and movies of Courtney and
the babies!
Baby Chicks! Coming Soon To a Coop Near You!
Baby chicks and eggs have
been a symbol of spring since ancient times – perhaps all the way back to the
time when chickens were first domesticated.
They also have been important symbols in Christianity from the times of
the early church. The egg symbolizes the
rock tomb where Christ’s body was laid and the hatching chick symbolizes His resurrection.
So it is highly appropriate
that baby chick day here at the Hipster Hen Ranch will be Easter Sunday. The
chick nursery is set up and ready to go and Courtney and I are both eagerly awaiting
the soon-to-arrive babies.
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| The Chick Nursery |
Some specifics on the
nursery:
Chick
water font filled with electrolyte solution: The small water font is designed for
babies. The electrolytes are because the
chicks may be stressed. They are
traveling from Eastern Wisconsin to Minnesota over the course of a day during
the very first day of their lives. While
car travel will not be as stressful as being plunked into a box and sent
through the mail, it is still more
taxing than just hanging around the spot they are hatched.
Baby
chick crumbles: Eventually
Courtney will take her brood outside where they’ll learn about bugs, seeds, and
scratching in the dirt, but for now they will be eating crumbles designed specifically for baby chicks by
our friends at Purina.
Paper
Towels: I always start babies on
paper towels. I don’t recommend
newspapers since they are too slippery.
Many people use pine shavings and while I'll switch to
that when the chicks are older, I like to start with paper towels.
The chicks will instinctively scratch and peck at the floor from the
get-go, and eating pine shavings is not particularly healthy for babies. I scatter crumbles all over the floor and
they will have a good time pecking at those – and the crumbles will be much easier to
find on paper towels than they would if they were all mixed up with pine shavings. Paper towels are handy because as they become soiled, I can just layer more towels over the top. In a few weeks, when the chicks are ready for pine shavings, I can just roll up the whole mass of paper towels and put them in the compost pile.
Heat
lamp: The lamp is hanging high in
the air and will provide supplemental heat.
When the chicks are cold, or want to sleep, they’ll find a nice warm spot
under Courtney’s wing - their main heat source. And while it isn't a thought I like to dwell on, there’s the possibility that Courtney will
not accept these babies. If that were to
occur, I would move the heat lamp lower it would be the primary heat source.
Mama hen: I have great faith in this sweet little bird. She’s been patiently sitting on golf balls for weeks!
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| The Ever-Patient Courtney |
Spring: Yay! Season Creep: Not so Yay
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| Glorious Spring Bursts Forth! - Or more prosaically, a Minnesota maple tree buds in early March |
This year my experiment is to plant a cover crop of oats in the run. If I plant the oats early, they can get a running start before the trees leaf out, then somewhere around mid-May I’ll open the gate from the smaller run and the chickens can get into the big run and go crazy on the oats.
So last weekend I spent a couple hours in the chicken run with a 50 pound bag of seed oats. I hand cast the oats throughout the run and then raked the leaf litter around to cover the oats and hoped for the best. It was a beautiful day to be outside – the thermometer topped out at 70, the chickadees were singing their spring song, and I could hear yellow bellied sap suckers hammering away somewhere off in the woods. I stopped seeding oats to chat with my neighbor who was hauling buckets of maple sap down the hill from the trees he’s tapping on my property, and stopped again to watch a large flock of Sandhill cranes fly noisily overhead. Then I went in the house and rewarded myself for my hard work with an entire box of Girl Scout cookies. It’s the time of year for them as well, and I’m just a little addicted. Once a box is opened I can’t stop until it’s gone. Each cookie is pretty small, right? And they just melt in your mouth. I avoid looking at the nutritional information on the box.
All in all, it was a great day. And yet, here’s why it was not great: Seventy degrees in early March is unheard of here in the St. Croix Valley of Minnesota. The average high for this time of year is the low forties. We’ve been consistently breaking records for high temperatures. The maple syruping season usually gets under way in mid-March. This year it may be ending already. My neighbor complained that it hasn’t been getting cold enough at night for the sap to run and he’s only had a few good days. And the buds are already swelling on the trees, so even if the sap runs again, it will be past prime and will have an off taste. The very fact that I’m seeding oats in early March is telling. The USDA Agricultural Statistics Board lists the typical start date for planting oats in Minnesota as April 10, with the most active planting dates running from April 25 to May 14. So while spring is always joyful, these early springs temper that joy.
Last year, of course, we had snow cover until April. Maybe that will happen again next year and we’ll be hearing a lot of “told-you-so’s” from the climate change deniers. Which is why climate scientists tell us it’s important to look at long term trends.
Phenologists, those folks who keep track of annual cycle events – when plants bloom, when birds migrate, and so on, refer to changes in the timing of the seasons as “season creep.” It is a well-documented phenomenon. According to US Geological Survey ecologist Jake Weltzin, “When you gather together all the scientific studies…we can see that about 80 percent of the species are changing earlier in the spring.” This has been observed all over the world: Cherries are blossoming earlier in Japan, northern hardwood forests are leafing out earlier and keeping their leaves longer, English oaks are producing acorns earlier, and ice is disappearing earlier from North American lakes. All of this can lead to ecological catastrophe. One example: The English Oak, a ubiquitous and well-known tree in Britain, is leafing out earlier which means that the caterpillar of the Winter Moth is hatching earlier to feed on the leaves. Pied Flycatchers, a bird that feeds largely on these caterpillars, are now arriving from their spring migration at a point when most of the caterpillars have already pupated into moths. The Pied Flycatcher population has declined sharply.
And of course, in the larger picture, season creep is just one more indicator of climate change and all of its consequences: Record hot and dry weather, drought, crop failures, dwindling water supplies, illness and death from heat-related health conditions, drowning polar bears, disappearing glaciers, rising oceans, flooded coastal areas, and extreme storms.
But as I stand in the chicken run and cast seeds to the earth, it is so hard to think of all of that. The return of spring is something we all count on and anticipate year after year. Our joy at the melting of the snow and the springing to life of the world around us is both primal and innate. I can intellectually appreciate that this early spring is wrong. But it is just like eating too many Girl Scout cookies – it’s bad, but it feels so good!
Courtney the Silkie Again – And a Word about the Upcoming Baby Chicks
Here’s a video clip of my
broody hen, Courtney, doing some interesting chicken behavior. Notice how she picks of bits of pine shavings and feathers and puts them on her back. I've seen
other hens engage in this behavior before and while I've not been able to
find a definitive answer as to why hens do this, some suggest that it’s for camouflage. In the wild, a nesting hen staying in one
location for an extended period of time would be a sitting duck (um….chicken)
for predators. By covering herself with
grass and other nearby material she better blends in with her
surroundings. Poor Courtney would have a
tough time blending in with her surroundings in the wild unless she was nesting
on a fluffy white rug, but she can rest assured that she’s very safe and secure
in the coop.
It is nineteen days and
counting until I pick up the babies that Courtney will be mothering. The babies are coming from Wick Place Farm, a small, charming farm in
southeastern Wisconsin that is home to alpacas, turkeys, bees, and several
breeds of chickens. The babies will be Cream Legbars, a
breed of chicken that is relatively rare in the US.
Cream Legbars have
silver-gray barred necks and bodies, salmon colored breasts, a half-comb in the
front of their heads and a unique cream and gray crest of feathers on the back
of their heads. Their eggs are sky
blue. One unique feature of Cream
Legbars is that they are autosexing – the male and females chicks can be
differentiated based on the pattern of their markings. They were developed at
Cambridge University from a variety of breeds, including Leghorns, Barred
Plymouth Rocks, and Auracanas and were introduced at the London Dairy Show in
1947. Greenfire Farms, the only legal
importer of Cream Legbars to the United States, brought the first breeding groups
to this country in 2010 and Wick Place Farm acquired their stock from Greenfire
Farms. These little guys will grow into
normal sized chickens, so they will rather quickly reach a point where they’re
bigger than their adopted mom. It will
be an interesting sight to see if they’re still trailing along behind her at
that point!
Broody Hens Again: Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Broodiness But Were Afraid To Ask
I got some questions about broody hens after yesterday’s
post, so here’s more, plus an update on my broody hen situation.
To recap what I said yesterday in a couple of sentences:
Chickens are really bad moms. The maternal instinct has pretty much been bred
out of most breeds of chickens.
Typically the egg laying cycle goes something like this: (1)
Just prior to laying an egg the hen’s pituitary pumps tons of a hormone called
prolactin into her bloodstream and she clucks, “I’m gonna lay this egg, and
then by golly, I’m gonna sit on it for 21 days until it hatches – I’m gonna
have me a baby chick!” (2) Hen then lays previously mentioned egg. (3) Hen’s
prolactin levels return to normal. (4) Hen says, “Wait….what was I thinking?”
hops out of the nest & goes about her business of pecking and scratching.
(5) Somebody collects the egg and we all get omelets.
It is actually a good thing hens are bad moms – if they
started pining about all those lost eggs, got depressed and stopped laying
eggs, we would all suffer. Also, a hen sitting on eggs is not necessary for the
propagation of chickens. Some hobbyists still get baby chicks this way but the
poultry industry relies on incubators almost completely.
Occasionally, though, after a hen lays an egg, her pituitary
continues pumping prolactin and she gets very serious about sitting on the nest
for the requisite 21 days and raising babies. That phenomenon is known to
poultry people as broodiness. The term broodiness was coined to describe
chicken behavior and only later was borrowed to describe people. But you can
imagine how a broody hen acts. She sits alone in a dark place, growls threateningly
at any chicken or person who comes near her, stops laying more eggs, and takes
maybe a 5 minute break once a day to eat, drink, and poop. Otherwise, she just
sits there 24/7.
Sadly, in most domestic poultry situations, because there is
no rooster, a broody hen is sitting on sterile eggs that will never hatch.
Also, more than likely her eggs are collected as she lays them, so she’s
actually sitting on an empty nest and in deep denial.
This is exactly the situation that has been going on with my
two little Silkie hens, Emily and Courtney. Courtney has entrenched
herself in a nest box with her head facing a back corner and looks just like a
giant cotton ball from outside the nest box. Emily scratched out a depression
in the straw on the floor in a back corner of the coop. Neither of them are
sitting on any eggs, but there they sit. The perfect solution when a hen goes
broody would be to give her some fertile eggs, or allow her to hatch her own,
but of course then you have baby chicks and that is usually not a practical
outcome. A less perfect solution is to break the hen’s broodiness.
If you surf the net, it isn’t hard to find all sorts of
suggested methods for breaking broodiness. Some of them, such as dunking the
hen in ice-cold water, seem extreme. I use a method that seems less cruel. I
put my hens in jail. I put them in a wire crate, so they can’t go back to their
nests. There’s nothing to make a nest out of in the crate, so they are unable
to nest. In theory, after a few days in this situation, a hen’s raging hormones
will abate and at that point she can go back in the coop with the other
chickens. Normally, after some initial complaining, hens don’t seem to be too
distressed to be in the crate. Eventually, they start eating again, and
drinking, and roosting at night on a roost within the crate.
After a few days, they get out of jail, and are totally
reformed chickens, their broodiness gone and forgotten. In a couple of
weeks they start laying eggs again.
This time, though – for the first time ever, I wanted to
maintain the broodiness so these little hens could be moms for the baby chicks
I’m bringing home later this month. To that end, I first decided to improve
Emily’s situation. I created what I have dubbed a "luxury nest box"
by turning a plastic waste basket on its side and putting a cushy excelsior pad
in the bottom. Then I added a handful of golf balls – just like having real
eggs to sit on! I removed Emily from the little nest she had made in the straw
and put the luxury nest box down on top of her nest. Emily went to find some
food and water – something she does only a couple times a day when she’s broody
– and I went about my business. When I checked in with her later in the day,
she was out in the main part of the coop clucking and scratching with the other
hens. She had completely lost her broodiness. I was astounded. Considering the
difficulty I’ve had in the past breaking Emily’s broodiness, I was amazed that
I had accomplished it simply by covering her old nest with the luxury box.
One failure – on to the next hen. I took the same luxury nest
box that had not provided any inspiration to Emily and put it in a small
separate coop along with food and water, and then removed a protesting Courtney
from her nest box and placed her in this coop. When I checked back later,
Courtney had buried herself in the luxury box so far that all I could see was
her fluffy white butt. And she was sitting on the pile of golf balls with great
contentment. Yes! Success! Hopefully she’ll continue her vigil until the chicks
show up!
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| All you can see is Courtney's fluffy backside as she tries with great determination to hatch golf balls . |
Broody Hens
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| Buffy the Buff Orpington Demonstrates Broodiness |
There is always an adjustment period when you add new hens to
your flock. Flocks maintain a strict
pecking order and when new chickens are introduced the entire pecking order has
to be reestablished. This can be a
brutal process. You can expect pecking
hard enough to draw blood – and the new hens usually take the brunt of it
because they are young and inexperienced, they are smaller, and they are
outnumbered. There have been a couple of
occasions where I have actually removed a chicken to prevent it from being
injured or killed.
I have always raised baby chicks under heat lamps and
introduced them to the flock when they are old enough to defend themselves. With
new babies showing up here at the end of the month I’ve been mulling over what
I can do to make the process easier. Right
now I’m considering raising the babies with a broody hen. Since the hen is already a member of the
flock there is the potential that the flock will accept her chicks more readily
than they would “strange” chickens. And
potentially the young ones will have a mom to protect them from the other
chickens. This is all great in
theory. First, though, I need a broody
hen.
A broody hen is simply a hen that sits on eggs until they
hatch and then takes care of the babies.
Broody hens are as rare as hens’ teeth.
Broodiness has been bred out of most modern breeds of chickens because
broodiness costs commercial egg producers money. When a hen goes broody and decides that she
wants to hatch a clutch of eggs, she stops laying more eggs and sits on her eggs
almost around the clock with only very brief breaks to eat and poop. If there is no rooster, she’s sitting on
sterile eggs, but that doesn’t deter her.
If you take away all of her eggs, she will continue to sit in the empty
nest, pining away. If you are in the
business of producing eggs, this hen is useless. Not only is she not laying, but being broody
is physically taxing since she’s not eating or exercising adequately. So breeders have selected for hens that don't go broody and today most breeds simply never do. They must be propagated entirely by
artificial incubators.
There are some heritage breeds, though, that retain the
propensity for broodiness – Marans are one such breed. Orpingtons also frequently go
broody. And there are Silkies. Silkies go broody at the drop of a hat. The smallest trigger- changes in lighting,
leaving eggs in the nest boxes too long, looking at them wrong – will make them
go broody. It’s a problem. While Silkies
generally aren’t kept for egg production anyway, it is still unhealthy for a
chicken to be broody all of the time. So
when my little fluffy girls go broody, I usually try to break their
broodiness. There are a several tried
and true methods to break broodiness – more on that in a later post.
Right now both of my little Silkie hens are broody and
rather than breaking them of it, I am encouraging them. They are currently both sitting on a small
pile of golf balls. On the day I get my
babies, I plan to sneak into the coop in the dead of night and surreptitiously
remove the golf balls and replace them with baby chicks. Hopefully, they will think that the eggs have
hatched. They will then raise their
babies who will be destined to grow to be twice as big as they are. When the time comes, Moms and semi-grown
babies will be reintroduced to the flock.
To be clear, I’ve never tried this before. Will it work?
Stay tuned.
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| Emily and Courtney the Silkie Hens |
Why Did The Blogger Cross The Road? To Get Started!
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| With my buddy, Snowball the Silkie Rooster |
About nine thousand years ago, somebody in East Asia had the
bright idea that they could nab some jungle fowl out of the wild and keep them
in a little coop by their house. Thus,
the chicken was domesticated and keeping chickens became a thing.
My personal history of keeping chickens is a bit more
recent. I live on a mostly wooded acreage
near the Twin Cities in Minnesota. In
the nearly thirty years that I have lived here, I have considered domestic
livestock from time to time. For many
years we parked our cars in a 20 x 40 pole barn. When we finally built a real garage about fifteen
years ago, the pole barn became this empty and unused space. That’s when I thought once again about
livestock, and how I had an ideal building for animals. I gave it enough thought to go through the
list of possibilities. Many farm animals
are inconveniently large and ultimately get slaughtered for meat. I decided I didn’t want to go there. Alpacas and sheep can be kept for wool, and
while my wife had a past interest in spinning, weaving, and natural dying, that
phase had passed. So, if I got sheep or
alpacas I would need to find people who could put all that wool to practical
use. I could get cows or goats and put
their milk to practical use myself. But
cows are gigantic and goats are, well….goats.
Chickens, on the other hand, produce eggs – another product I could use
myself. I grew up on a farm and am sort
of familiar with raising chickens – although, in the interest of full
disclosure, it was my mom who did the bulk of the chicken chores. I thought they were pretty boring – a barn
full of identical white hens who laid eggs for a while and then got turned into
stew. But after some net surfing, I came
to realize that there were a gazillion different breeds of chickens in an
amazing array of sizes, shapes, and colors.
They laid brown or blue or white or green eggs. They were intelligent, and had fascinating
social interactions. Flock keepers were
passionate about their birds. They were
anything but boring! So maybe it would
be chickens!
But it didn’t happen. Instead, the pole barn became a convenient
place to store junk. Realistically, I
was too busy with my career and raising my kids to think about animals.
Finally, in November of 2011, I started working part-time as
the first step in a transition to ultimate retirement. It was then that my daughter taunted me with,
“You’ve been talking about chickens for years.
Now you’ve got spare time. If you
are ever going to get chickens, it needs to happen now.”
I started building the first coop in 2012 and my first
peeping boxful of baby chicks arrived in the mail in the spring of 2013. I had become a chicken guy! My colleagues at
work followed my chicken stories with great interest. Several of them convinced me that it was
absolutely incumbent upon me as a keeper of chickens to have a few Silkies. I finally caved to their pressure and told
them I would get some Silkie
chickens, but to make it clear to the world who was responsible for these
fluffy little birds becoming members of my flock, I would name the Silkies
after those very co-workers. This, of
course, produced a severe case of workplace conflict which could only be
resolved by my naming other chickens after other co-workers. Eventually, my original batch of eighteen
chickens all had names. Many, but not
all of them are named for co-workers.
The tradition of naming chickens has continued and now I can’t imagine
owning a nameless chicken.
I finally completely retired in July of 2015. I have been thinking about starting a blog
about my chicken keeping experience since then, and today it has begun. I have been semi-seriously blogging about my international travel experiences for a few years, so it is a natural extension
for me to also write about my other great interest. In fact, while I do a major trip about once a
year, my chickens are here every day.
And they continue to be a great source of material.
My plan at this moment is to pull retrospective material
about my chickens from old letters and Facebook posts and include it in this
blog as back-dated posts to give a sense of how I got started on this endeavor
and the trials and joys of the first few years.
So ultimately this seminal post may become lost somewhere in the
middle. But for the moment, this will be
both the first and the last entry in this new blog. There will be much more to come.
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