We've just moved to a lifestyle block, owned by my husband's father, in Awahuri, New Zealand. There are chickens here and I have taken up the responsibility of feeding them, which feels pretty much like jumping into farming at the shallow end.
We have a couple of Khaki Campbell ducks, a guinea fowl, and about 9 Rhode Island Red chickens free ranging, and one of the hens was looking after four chicks when we got here. When we moved we brought two cats with us, so we thought it prudent to lock the brood in an old rabbit hutch that had been used as a chicken tractor for previous chicks by the owners of the property.
We recently had torrential rain from the tail end of tropical cyclone Wilma. Unfortunately a couple of the chicks managed to jump out of the nest box and did not know how to jump back in, so when I went to check on them I found two prone and lifeless looking bodies in the grass.
I picked them both up and one of them moved a leg so I bustled them inside and held them against my body for warmth. The bigger chick twitched his leg a bit and then expired, but the smaller chick started to open her beak and within an hour had warmed up, and fluffed up enough for me to return her to her mother.
Unfortunately, because I was too slack to fuss about in the rain, I didn't fix up a step for her so when I checked on her later the next day I found her in the rain, lying prone and limp in the grass again. She hadn't been there long though, as I had fed the chickens no more than half an hour earlier. I managed to warm her back up to conscious once more, and returned her to her mother, and added a brick to the box so she could jump back into the box. That was a learning experience.
All was well for about a week but one of her siblings mysteriously went missing and it became obvious that she was not being cared for by her mother. Her remaining sibling seemed to be getting all the food and she spent much of her time hiding in the grass or under the edge of the wooden frame, out of the nest box. She was so weak that even with the step I had added she could not climb into the box so I decided to bring her inside.
Since the warm wet weather we have had an abundance of flies now and she is enjoying feasting on them as I catch them for her. She is growing stronger by the day. It is still unclear whether she will make it to fully grown. Our oldest boy, Alexander, is loving having a cute baby chicken in the house. We have assumed that she is female but she hasn't actually been sexed so it may turn out that if we can get her to size, and she is a "he", then he will end up on the dinner table. This may be one of those traumatic growth experiences that small children endure. Only time will tell.
I have a friend in Feilding who has recently acquired an incubator and she is keen to go halves on any chickens if I can collect a clutch of eggs. I've been told that there is every likelihood that all the eggs the chooks are laying are fertile but currently we have one hen with three chicks, another with one (and the one I have inside), one who is laying flimsy shelled eggs in the nest box in the hen house and then standing on them and smashing them *sigh*, and one hen who has the rooster watch over her while she lays her eggs in a depression in the ground next to a corrugated iron fence... which is hardly a great place to sit on them.
Today Captain got a bunch of books from the library on keeping ducks and chickens. We are learning as we go!
