Getting Your Ducks in a Row for Raising Baby Chicks: Eight Questions and Answers

The expression "taking them under your wing” is one of about a million idiomatic phrases that originated with poultry keeping.  I’m sure you know what it means and I’m willing to bet that you’ve used the phrase yourself more than once.  But just in case you’ve never heard the expression, it means to nurture and protect those who are inexperienced, young, or in need of protection—just as mother hen nurtures and protects her baby chicks and gathers them under her protective wing.  When you adopt baby chicks, you’re taking these small, helpless, peeping balls of fluff under your wing.  It’s a big responsibility, and if you’ve never done it before, you should make sure you understand the list of basics before you undertake this big venture.  If you have done it before, it’s good to pull out that list and review it just to make sure you have all your ducks in a row (I’m mixing metaphors here, but it does present an interesting mental image!).  Raising baby chicks is not hard, after all, but there are a few things you have to consider and a few things you need to do right. 

I'll be publishing this post on June 5, and shortly after I post it, my wife, Kathy, and I will get in the car and set off on our quest for baby chicks.  If you’re reading it the day I post it, you can imagine us somewhere on I-35 headed south from Minnesota to Webster City, Iowa to pick up chicks at the Murray McMurray Hatchery.  Or maybe we’re on the way home and I’m holding a box of peeping fluff balls on my lap.  You can be sure that getting these babies was not a spontaneous decision.  What follows is a list of the questions I've asked myself and the answers I've come up with before getting these babies. I think these questions and answers will be useful to you if you're considering getting chicks for the first time, or if you're adding to your existing flock. There’s lots of useful information on the web about caring for baby chicks, and every time I’ve gotten chicks I’ve taken the time beforehand to sample from the collective knowledge of all those people who have raised chicks and written about it.  I’m including a lot of links to all those folks in this post.  It takes a village, don’t you know, to raise a chick. 

1 - Do I want chickens?  This is the obvious first thing you consider. If you’ve thought about owning chickens, you probably already realize that becoming a chicken owner will put you at the forefront of the local/sustainable food movement.  You’ll be producing food right in your own backyard!  If you already produce food in your backyard with a garden, chickens are a natural complement to that garden—the chickens will happily devour any leftover vegetable scraps and weeds you give them and all that composted chicken manure will make for some very happy garden plants!  Also, any chickens you keep will, without a doubt, be better treated and happier than the majority of the hens laying the eggs you find at the grocery store.  So, does it make you happy to imagine a small flock of hens clucking contentedly in your backyard?  If you immediately answer “yes” to that question, you’ve jumped the first hurdle!  That was the easy one!  Of course if you already have chickens the question becomes, “Do I want more, chickens?”  The answer to that question is always “yes”, naturally.

A Blind Hen

Bonnie the Cream Legbar hen cautiously wanders the coop, bumping into other chickens as she goes.  Bonnie has become functionally blind.  Her left eye is opaque and gray and her right eye has a tiny constricted pupil that never changes.  Her eyes worked just fine when she first hatched, but I noticed that she had eye problems as long ago as early last summer when her pupils became tiny constricted dots and she stopped going outside.  She knew her way around the coop, but outdoors was just too chaotic for a blind chicken.

The pupil of one eye is a tiny constricted dot while the other eye is opaque.  Result:  Bonnie is functionally blind

CHICKEN KISSING MENTIONED HERE!!!

Emerging Infectious Diseases, a scientific journal published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has published yet another scholarly article linking salmonella infections in humans with backyard chickens.  The October issue of this respected publication includes an article entitled “Outbreaks of Human Salmonella Infections Associated with Live Poultry, United States, 1990–2014.”  The epidemiology in this article is pristine and makes a clear connection between people infected with salmonella and their chickens.  But unhappily, there have been several unfortunate consequences of this and other similar CDC studies. 

First of all, the popular press has gotten it’s clutches on this news nugget and raced right for the catchy headline while ignoring the broader underlying message.  Thus we have Huffington Post, under the category of “weird news” shouting “Kissing Chickens Can Spread Salmonella”; while CNN proclaims, “CDC Report Crushes Your Chicken-Kissing Dreams”, and NPR coyly announces, “Chicken Owners Brood Over CDC Advice Not To Kiss, Cuddle Birds”, and Jezebel interjects, “Hey, Don’t Kiss Chickens.”  These headlines would lead one to believe that chicken kissing was the main focus of the study.  Kissing chickens was listed as a high risk behavior, but the percentage of people in the study who got salmonella after kissing chickens (13%) was a fraction of those who acquired salmonella after bringing chickens into their houses (46%).  But then the popular press obviously thinks chicken kissing is just plain weird while bringing a chicken into your house is hardly worth an eye-roll.

The second problem I have with these studies is that after the CDC has demonstrated a real problem, people getting Salmonella from their backyard chickens, it takes the next step and offers solutions.  I’m sure that CDC consulted with a broad range of individuals before proposing solutions, but did it actually talk to anybody in the backyard-chicken-keeping community?  From some of the suggested solutions I suspect that it didn’t.

And that lack of dialogue is creating the third problem:  There is a growing feeling among some in the backyard-chicken-keeping community that the CDC recommendations for safely keeping chickens is just another example of government intrusion into their lives.  One on-line comment:  “They don’t want the general public raising chickens!”  I’ve been waiting for someone to say, “They can have my chickens when they pry them from my cold, dead hands,” but thus far that has not popped up.

So what are the CDC recommendations?  Here they are directly from the CDC website—CDC’s recommendations are bolded, my comments are italicized:

1. Always wash your hands with soap and water right after touching live poultry or anything in the area where they live and roam.  I always wash my hands when I come into the house after having been in the chicken coop.  Do most chicken owners do this?  I’m going to guess, “Probably not.”  But speaking of washing your hands, many people have dogs and cats living right in their houses with them.  There’s probably a LOT of cat and dog petting going on all the time.  Cats and dogs, by the way, can carry about a gazillion diseases that are transmissible to humans.  The top five are hookworm, roundworms, toxoplasmosis, cryptosporidiosis, and Lyme disease, but the list goes on to include a whole host of other diseases that are rare but often fatal, including plague (aka Black Death).  So does CDC recommend that you wash your hands each and every time after interacting with your cat or dog?  Well, yes, actually.  Yes they do.  Does anybody do this?  I’m going to guess, “Probably not.”  And what about washing your hands after you’ve been in an area where cats and dogs “live and roam”?  Yeah, right.  Don't misunderstand what I'm saying here - I'm not unloading on cats and dogs--I've got several that live in my house, sleep in my bed, and walk on my face every day.  I'm just taking issue with the way CDC seems to be singling out one domestic animal.
2. Do not let live poultry inside the house, in bathrooms, or especially in areas where food or drink is prepared, served, or stored.  Here’s the deal.  Most backyard chicken keepers know that it is practically impossible NOT to bring chickens into their houses in certain circumstances.  Many folks start their flocks with baby chicks.  Babies need heat, protection from drafts, and a controlled environment that small backyard coops just can’t provide.  I would guess that pretty much everybody starts their babies in a box in the basement.  By the same token, sick or injured birds also need a controlled environment.  The most recent sick chicken to live in my basement was suffering from myiasis, also known as flystrike.  She had maggot infested wounds after flies laid eggs on her.  She needed a fly-free environment—my basement could provide that but my coop could not.
3. Don't let children younger than 5 years, adults older than 65, and people with weakened immune systems handle or touch chicks, ducklings, or other live poultry.  Is there good science behind this recommendation?  Absolutely.  Will everybody say, “Wow!  Look at this impressive science!  I’m gonna get right behind this good advice!”?  Abso-freakin-lutley not!  If you’ve got baby chicks you think your kids aren’t going to want to play with them?  Come on!  I reach the magical age of 65 next year.  The chances of me giving up my flock next year are slim to none - and slim just left town.  As useful advice, this one ranks up there with a bucket of warm spit.
4. If you collect eggs from the hens, thoroughly cook them.  Or if you buy them from a store.  Or get them from a neighbor, or whatever.  Or we could figure out a way to get control of this Salmonella problem and go back to the good old days of homemade mayo, eggnog, and Hollandaise. 
5. Don't eat or drink in the area where the birds live or roam.  Good advice.  And then I go back to the dog and cat thing in #1.
6. Avoid kissing your birds or snuggling them, then touching your mouth.  Good advice.  And then I go back to the cat and dog thing in #1.
7. Stay outdoors when cleaning any equipment or materials used to raise or care for live poultry, such as cages or feed or water containers.  I’ve got running water in my coop, so no prob.  Most people probably have a garden hose at the very least.  So this is doable.  Not bad -  there’s at least one bit of advice in this list that can be practically carried out.
8. Buy birds from hatcheries that participate in the U.S. Department of Agriculture National Poultry Improvement Plan (USDA-NPIP) U.S. voluntary Salmonella Monitoring Program. This program is intended to reduce the incidence of Salmonella in baby poultry in the hatchery.  Yes.  Stop disease at the source.  If you can eliminate Salmonella from hatcheries and guarantee that all those babies people are bringing into their backyards are Salmonella-free, it would effectively eliminate the main source of Salmonella in backyard flocks.  But here’s the problem.  Hatcheries that participate in NPIP inspections are tested for the presence of a few diseases:  These include a few Mycoplasma diseases—bacterial diseases affecting poultry.  Then there are certain strains of avian influenza (low virulence bird flu).  Finally, there are tests for a few of the Salmonellas.  But certainly not all of the bajillion different Salmonellas that chickens can carry and pass on to you.  The other ones are not in the NPIP guidelines and thus they're not tested for.  So how valuable is this recommendation?  Remember the bucket of warm spit?  We’re kinda back to that.

CDC Advice on Poultry Keeping

Now I’m going to say something that I think is really important, so I’m going to bold it and italicize it for emphasis.  Because to me, this is the whole deal:  If we could eliminate Salmonella from backyard flocks, or better yet, ALL flocks, all the CDC recommendations would be moot.  And while testing for and eradicating Salmonella from each backyard flock would be expensive and logistically difficult, testing and eradication at the source—the hatcheries and distributors—would provide a huge running start to eliminating Salmonella.  And the mechanism for doing that, NPIP, is already in place—it just needs to be broader, stronger, and more enforceable.  I suspect that there are hatcheries and distributors out there that are not very keen on this approach and would apply all sorts of political pressure against any legislation that would suggest it.  So it’s a whole lot easier and cheaper for government agencies like CDC to make lists of recommendations.  And if you're the press, publishing articles against chicken kissing probably actually sells copy.  So there you go.

The chief author of the EID publication that set me off on this rant is Dr. Colin Basler, a veterinarian and public health researcher who has done all sorts of good work on a variety of zoonotic diseases.  I sent him an email after I read the article expressing many of the same issues that I brought up in this post.  I haven’t heard back, but it would be nice if I did.  I realize that Dr. Basler doesn’t run the CDC, nor does he have the ability to legislate public health policy.  But it would be nice to have somebody in a position of authority recognize that since backyard flocks are growing in popularity for a variety of reasons, all of them good, that the incidence of poultry associated Salmonellosis will also continue to rise.  And since “education” by issuing lists of mostly impractical suggestions is not a good strategy for solving the problem, maybe it is time to explore better solutions.

Sour Crop and Flystrike: The Little Red Hen Gets Well

Readers:  I'm transitioning my blog to a new platform on Squarespace.  I've updated this blog post and moved it to the new location.  Click here to get there! - Randy

Social Engineering in the Coop – The Arlene Denouement

The more behavioral scientists study domestic chickens the more they come to appreciate their high intelligence and their complex social structure.  Chickens “talk” to each other with a large number of different vocalizations, each with its own meaning.  They show complex thinking in decision making—they take into account prior experience as well as their knowledge about their current situation.  They exhibit self-assessment, and make comparisons between themselves and other chickens in their flock.  They understand the rank of each chicken in the pecking order of their flock, which demonstrates logical reasoning ability. They engage in group activity when they forage and defend themselves.  They demonstrate long-term relationship-building (i.e. friendship) that requires long-term memory.  Author Annie Potts states “It now appears that the cognitive processes involved in representational thinking in chickens are similar to those required for associative learning in humans.”  The fact that chickens think like us is disturbing when you consider how the vast majority of domestic chickens are treated.  But it is also intriguing to think that just as we humans are subjected to subtle social manipulations by Madison Avenue and political campaigns, that chickens, too, can be socially manipulated, because they think like we do. 

What?! Another Sick Hen!

Unfortunately,  I have another sick hen to report today.  Jennifer, the white crested black Polish hen is not eating and lethargic and I’ve just separated her from the flock.  I don’t know if my recent plethora of sick chickens has to do with the incredibly wet summer we’ve had, the fact that many of my hens are getting old, or a combination of things, but since each sick hen seems to have her own distinct illness it isn’t like they’re infecting each other. 

Currently,  Roxie the Red is still recovering from her illness and is occupying the small pen where sick chickens usually stay, and Emily the Silkie is brooding away in the broody coop.  So I’m running out of places to put chickens!  I had to drag my outdoor “chicken gazebo” into the pole barn and have set up a sick room for Jennifer there.

Jennifer’s illness appears to be respiratory – she’s breathing with her beak open as though she can’t get enough air.  I did a throat swab to check for gape worms (more on gape worms later!) and there was no sign of worms, but there was some mucous.  If you’ve ever had pneumonia, you know how it can knock you for a loop.  Now imagine that your infected, congested lungs filled your whole body and you can imagine how Jennifer feels – birds' respiratory systems include not just their lungs but also five air sacs that are spread throughout their entire body cavity, and respiratory infections can involve the whole system.  Jennifer, when she’s healthy, is as crazy and fun as one expects Polish hens to be, and the other hens and I are missing her antics.  We’re all hoping she gets back on her feet soon.  Here’s a small gallery of Jennifer pictures from happier times.

Jennifer

Spending too much time in the rain can do terrible things to a girl's do

Baby Jennifer

Baseball, Sick Chickens, and Love

Right now I’m supposed to be sitting on the third deck behind home plate watching the Minnesota Twins play baseball.  Instead, I’m at home dealing with another coop crisis.  Before I explain, I should just say that this no doubt will become a “first in a series” post since it’s just the beginning of another “ongoing-situation.”  And I should also say that if you are eating, or squeamish, or eating and squeamish, you should probably not read this.

Roxie the Rhode Island Red

This time it’s Roxie the Rhode Island Red.  My poor Reds have just taken a beating lately!  I noticed a couple of days ago that Roxie had some diarrhea—it’s an easy thing to notice when a bird’s feathers become soiled with poop.  When I notice this on just one hen and it’s a new thing, I keep a watchful eye, but I certainly don’t panic.  Hens get diarrhea—sometimes it’s just due to the heat or “something they ate” and sometimes it’s due to something more serious.  So I watch and wait.  Roxie seemed bright-eyed and active so my concern for her was mild at most. 

This afternoon as I was cleaning the coop I noticed Roxie make a couple of attempts to hop the short distance into a nest box and fail at both attempts.  This is when my concern went up a few notches and I picked her up for a quick exam.  Her eyes were bright, her comb was a nice bright red, and neither her crop nor her abdomen felt puffy or distended.  But there was a lot of poopy feathers on her back side, so I flipped her over to take a closer look and then audibly gasped.  She had become fly-blown.  Here’s the part you don’t want to read if you’re squeamish.  Sometimes in the summertime certain flies find their way to hens who are suffering from diarrhea.  Flies, as we all know, love poop.  So the female fly deposits her eggs on the poop-laden feathers.  When the maggots hatch, they immediately burrow into the chicken’s skin and create bloody skin ulcers that are laden with thousands of maggots.  A hen can go from normal to fly-blown in 24 hours, and can go from fly-blown to dead in an equally short period of time.  Roxie’s back end was teeming with maggots.  I immediately carried her to the house, took her to the laundry room,  and bathed her several times in dog shampoo and water, removing all the poop and maggots that I could find.  I found several large maggot-eaten ulcers around her vent.  I trimmed the feathers around all the bad spots and treated them all with Veterycin, an antimicrobial for animals.  Then I installed her in a crate in the basement, and mixed up some probiotic and electrolyte solution to get her diarrhea under control.  After that I finished cleaning the coops, and in the process checked all of the chickens to make sure that nobody else was maggot-infested.  It took the rest of my afternoon & most of my evening.  Tomorrow morning I’ll start in again and give Roxie’s ulcers a good wash with betadine and follow up with more Veterycin.  Roxie will be living in the basement until she heals.  Her diarrhea is not yet under control, there are no doubt more fly eggs that I missed that will hatch into maggots, and there is the strong possibility that the ulcerated areas will become infected.  She’ll be getting lots of baths and TLC.  I really hope that this sweet little bird makes it.

Speaking of sweet, my wife, Kathy, scratched the baseball game off her evening's plans and went out and bought Chinese takeout for both of us.  I told her later that one thing I'd accomplished today was to grasp two expressions of love:  "Love is being willing to pick maggots and poop off your chicken's butt.  And love is when you see your husband storm into the house, wild-eyed, ranting, and with a chicken under his arm, and you just calmly do what you need to do."  Kathy rolled her eyes and in an aside to our dog said, "You know, Bailey, it sounds like I love him and he loves his chickens."  Well, yeah.  I do love my chickens.  She hit that nail on the head.  But I love her kind of a lot, too.

For the rest of Roxie's story, see the post, "Sour Crop and Flystrike:  The Little Red Hen Gets Well"

[This post has been shared on "Clever Chicks Blog Hop #218]

Sometimes Hens Get Sick--Sometimes Hens Die

The bulk of the chickens in my flock are in their fourth year  - well past the age that most commercial laying hens are allowed to live.  And I know that chickens don't live forever.  Over the millennia that chickens have been domesticated, high egg production was the trait that was valued above all else—so that's the trait that was selected for.  Longevity wasn’t even considered, since chickens typically were slaughtered long before the end of their natural life.  Thus, chickens don’t have long lives. Laying an egg practically every day eventually wears a hen out.  It is highly probable that eventually something will go wrong with her complex, high production egg-laying machinery—the oviduct becomes infected; an egg becomes impacted; the oviduct breaks and leaks yolk into the abdominal cavity which becomes infected; tumors form—the list goes on.

When I was a kid on the farm, the problems of aging hens was not a problem because there were no aging hens.  Chickens raised for meat were slaughtered in their first year.  Laying hens were kept for two years and when their egg production slowed they became stew.  Old chickens and their health problems became a reality only recently, when people like me started keeping small backyard flocks.  We backyard chicken people bond with our chickens and our rationale for keeping them goes beyond eggs and meat.  We keep them for the pleasure of keeping them, and for the satisfaction that comes with nurturing them and giving them a good and happy life.  Chickens have become pets.  And that’s OK—chickens are fascinating, compelling, and beautiful animals.  But the grim reality that is interwoven with the many pleasures of keeping a flock of backyard hens is the anxiety and angst of dealing with the inevitable sick birds and the anguish when one of those sick birds dies. 

Hipster Hens Hate Heat!

At 7 PM, the temp in the coop was still hovering around 90 degrees

Like most of the country, we’re in the midst of a July heatwave here in Minnesota.  For the last several days the temps have been in the nineties and once you factor in the high humidity, the heat index has been in the 100’s.  Last night it only cooled down to the high seventies and this morning the temperature started rising with the sun.  If you live in Phoenix, I’m sure what I just described is business as usual.  But Minnesotans are about as used to and equipped for handling hot weather as folks in the South are used to and equipped for handling snow.

The heat has been pretty stressful for the hens.  The drop in egg production is proof of how stressed they are.  The egg count yesterday was one.  One single egg.  That egg was compliments of Veronica the Easter Egger.  The nest boxes are small and enclosed and hens give off heat. While she was sitting in the nest box she was sticking her head out of it as far as she could, her beak was open, and she was panting the entire time.  Laying that egg was miserable for her. 

Chickens have three main ways of getting rid of excess body heat.  One way is simply by radiating it away from their bodies from their skin surface. Chickens were domesticated from the Asian Red Jungle Fowl, a bird of the tropics whose body is designed for getting rid of heat.  The Red Jungle Fowl has a huge comb that has a rich blood supply and works just like a cooling fin by expelling lots of body heat.  Unfortunately, domestication has resulted in different shapes, sizes and feather patterns, and some of them are actually adaptations for cold weather, which means those chickens are less able to deal with heat.  Because combs can freeze in the winter, most of the chickens I’ve selected for my flock have combs that are small – great for winter, but bad for hot weather.  My Silkies and Cochins also hold more heat since they have feathers all the way down their legs and on their feet, again not a good trait for hot weather.  Last night when the hens were roosting, many of them were spreading their wings to increase their body surface area and dissipate as much body heat as they could, and many of the bigger and older hens were panting.  

Charlie Barred Rock pants

Panting is a second way chickens get rid of heat—the air they breathe out is hotter than the air they breathe in, so as the weather gets hot, the chickens pant to increase their air exchange.

Darcy Barred Rock spreads her wings to cool down

Maran the Cuckoo Marans hen takes an ungainly pose as she pants and spreads her wings

A third way chickens expel heat is to increase their water intake, just like humans.  Drinking more water works to cool us because we sweat and also because the urine we pass is warmer than the water we drink. Chicken’s bodies are very different from ours, so bear with me as I talk a little about biology.  First of all, chickens don’t sweat.  Sweating, contrary to what all those antiperspirant ads would have us believe, is a wonderful thing—it keeps us cool.  But since chicken don’t sweat, any heat transferred into the extra water they drink must be expelled by passing more urine, right?  But hold on!  Chickens don’t pee either!  Chicken’s kidneys produce uric acid which is eventually exits their body with their poop.  Chickens only have one opening in the back so everything – uric acid, poop, and eggs all enter the world from that one opening.  Which is very efficient but also maybe a little disgusting if you didn’t know that before.  But back on subject, chickens don’t pee, so they can’t transfer heat that way!  “Well,” you say, “We’re running out of options here!  So crap!”  “Bingo!” I say.  Chickens get rid of all that extra water by producing lots of loose, runny poop.  Welcome to the wonderful world of staying cool through diarrhea! This works great for the chicken, but can be disconcerting for the new flock owner uninitiated in the concept of excretory heat transfer (the technical term)!  And it can create some very foul fowl.  My sweet little fluffy white Silkie hen, Courtney, got a bath today because the back half of her body was drenched in—Ok that’s too much information.

(Please note:  I'm not providing a picture of the third type of heat transfer, much to the relief of all of us, I'm sure.)

So I’m doing what I can to keep the flock cool.  I have a huge industrial fan that blows air through the pole barn all day and well into the night.  I also have been replacing the water in the water fonts several times a day.  I get my water from a well, so it’s icy cold when it’s fresh.  

Large industrial fan

And yesterday, I decided to try a new trick.  I capped an old garden hose, hooked it up to the cold well water, snaked it through both chicken runs, and then used a nail to punch a bunch of holes in it.  It immediately started spraying a fine mist of cold water.

The chickens ran to the spraying water and joyously splashed around!  OK, the previous sentence is what I wanted to happen, but is, in fact, a complete lie.  The chickens were terrified by this strange new hissing snake-like thing in their run.  They all ran away from it like cats from a cucumber, dashed into the coop and cowered in a corner.  Eventually, one brave and smart chicken strode forth, started pecking at the spray, and decided that it was quite cool, delicious, and wonderful.  That chicken was Snowball the Silkie roo.  Perhaps I was witnessing evolution at work--the smart, brave chicken gets the water, thus survives.  After a while he went back into the coop and came back a short time later with his BHF (Best Hen Forever), Angitou.  How did she know to follow him?  I guess he must have told her!  Eventually all the chickens went back into the run.  Today they’re used to the hose and amble over frequently to cool down.  But there hasn’t been any joyous splashing.  My lesson learned:  Chickens are not ducks.

(There's a video of Snowball enjoying water from the hose on the "Randy's Chicken Blog" Facebook page.  Videos work better on Facebook, so I'm not embedding it here, but go please go over there and enjoy it!)

Hipster hens nonchalantly staying cool by the somewhat terrifying hose

While the temperature is in the mid-nineties again today, it is less humid.  Tomorrow we’re expecting highs in the eighties, so maybe the worse of this heat wave is over.  And as we Minnesotans say, “Next winter we’ll all be wishing for some of this warmth!”

The Chicks - Latest Update

I am sorry to report that one of the babies looked lethargic on the evening of April 1, and by the next morning when I went to the coop I found that she had died during the night.  I am completely mystified as to the cause.  One thing you need to watch for in baby chicks is pasty butt - a condition that occurs in baby chicks where poop sticks to the down around their vent and can build up to the point where it forms an impermeable plug - it can be fatal and is easily avoided simply by washing the poop off their down.  This chick did not suffer from that and as a matter of fact showed no outward appearance of any problem.  Baby chicks can simply mysteriously die, and that's where I am at with this one.  I've been worried that this baby died of something potentially infectious, but time has passed and the others continue to be happy and healthy, so I would like to think that I am out of the woods for an infectious disease.

Meanwhile the chicks have been christened.  I would like to introduce Bonnie, Marissa, Nicky, and Paulette!  They are a week and a day old now - notice how they're already getting little wing feathers!

Courtney & Babies - 8 days old