The Cutest Little Chicks

So we now have 7 new chicks! And are they ever adorable!

It has been a while since I’ve been able to add a new post… and for good reason. Not only have we been busy with all our new animals (the 4 additional “big goats”, the pot bellied pig, Charlie, and his buddy, the Silkie rooster, Blue), but we had another new goat join our farm (who also came from a rescue situation). I’ll add more updates on the goats soon, but in the meantime, we have brought home 7 new baby chicks.

I’ve always wanted several Silkies, and when we saw the ad for some Silkie x Frizzle chicks, we couldn’t resist! We had recently decided we wanted a unique flock of chickens on our farm, so not only were we fortunate enough to acquire the Silkies, we also brought home a Cream Brabanter, and two Brabanter x Maran chicks in the group (which their breeder had developed as a unique breed and called “Maranters“).

We brought the new chicks home on February 23. They were about 3 weeks old at the time. As this is our first experience with little chicks, it has been very exciting to see them grow and develop, and lots of fun learning about how to take care of them. Actually, so much so that we had decided to try and hatch some of our own! We currently have 12 eggs that we collected from our original chickens in a homemade incubator, and they are due to hatch in the next few days! And we didn’t stop there… we are getting some Ameraucana chicks to add to the mix next week. Hopefully we’ll get a few hens in the new group, so we can have some colourful eggs in the future (Ameraucanas lay the unique blue eggs).

The kids decided on a Star Wars “theme” for naming the new chicks. It has been a bit challenging getting them all to stay still for pictures, but I’ve managed to get individual pictures of all the chicks, and posted them below. I’ve also included an assortment of pictures from the day we brought them home until now (they are currently just over 6 weeks old). Although it is still a bit early to know which are hens and which are roosters, we are pretty sure that one of the Maranters (we’ve named him Malgus) is a rooster, and we think the other (named Poe) is probably a hen. The rest are still a mystery!

The brooder box we have built for them is working really well. We used some interlocking mats that the kids already had (both for the base and the walls), and have them under a brooder lamp in the garage. The weather has still been pretty cold, with below freezing temperatures at night, so they are not quite ready to go outside. However, we now have a new project – building another chicken coop to house all of our new chicks! More on that as we build it…

So for now, I hope you enjoy looking through the pictures of our adorable (and unique) new chicks.