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.

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 Legbar Quints know who their mama is.

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!

Scientists didn’t delve into the study of imprinting in birds until the early 20^th 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!