These chicks, hatched yesterday, are getting a lesson about drinking from their attentive mother. Little chicks are very curious. They look at everything with wide eyes, but they stay close to their mother.
27 Days and Getting Big
The eight chicks which hatched on April 28 are now 27 days old. They are too big now to all fit under their mother at once. They are probably halfway on their way to being independent. Their mother is a Buff Orpington, and generally they raise their chicks for two months. We will see as each mother is different.
When raising chicks in open pasture, a mother is imperative. Just like human children, chicks are quite oblivious to danger. They are so caught up in their own little worlds that they don’t see the hawk flying high above. Their mother and other grown chickens will, and she will scurry them off to safety, just like a human mother will grab a child who wanders off the sidewalk into the street.
Just like a group of human children, these eight chicks jabber nonstop all day long. I wonder if it drives their mother crazy. Or does she just tune it out like human mothers do?
Buff Orpington, our favorite backyard chicken ~ The Tangled Nest
Orpington Chicken ~ the Livestock Conservancy
Buff Orpington ~ Pinterest
Breeding Exhibition Tips ~ United Orpington Club
Buff Orpington ~ City Girl Chickens
Orpington Chickens ~ Poultry Keeper
Out for a Walk
Most people think of chickens as stupid, simple creatures. Yet, when you watch a mother hen with her chicks, she is constantly interacting with them. She carries on a conversation with them from morning until night. As she leads them from place to place in search of food, she is also watching for any danger. She is watching and listening to the other chickens, as well as looking up and around for anything that might harm her young.
This is what it looks like when a hen takes her two and three day old chicks out for a walk. Of the billions of chickens raised in the US each year, only an infinitesimal few are lucky enough to have a mother to take them out for walk.
What’s Growing Today – May 19, 2014
What’s growing today? Figs, squash, shallots, mustard greens, and of course chicks.
These chicks are just two and three days old and out on grass. This is only possible by having a mother. Farmers and individuals raising baby chicks without mothers have them under heat lamps and indoors to protect them. If they do put them out on pasture, they won’t do it until the chicks are two or three weeks old. By then, much of their childhood will be behind them and they will have missed out on a lot of outdoors fun.