Today, we replaced the heat globe in the heat lamp for the brooder. The lamp that we had in the chicken coop last night, wasn’t really a proper heat lamp. The lamp did put out some heat, but not enough for keeping the chicks warm. Fortunately, the weather is warm enough so the temperature at night is only going down to about 5o Celsius.
My youngest daughter had a friend visiting today, and they spent a long time out in the coop with the chicks.
The chicks need to have some interaction with humans so that when they are older, they will not be so flighty. I was really proud of my daughter, she handled the chicks with confidence and she was very gentle with them.
I made some home-made pizza for lunch today, yummy ground beef, bacon and prawn pizzas. Our pizza also had chilli on it, but my youngest daughter is a bit soft when it comes to spicy food. They took their pizza out to the chicken coop to have a picnic with the chicks.
I managed to do some sexing of the chicks based on their ruff feathers. It seems that we have two boys and six girls. I’d call that a pretty good result.
Two of the chicks are a lot smaller than the other six, so I’d say that they are about a week behind the others in age.
Despite the problems with Isa Browns (not very hardy) I like them, they are very good layers (about 350 eggs per annum per chook), their eggs are a good size (averaging 70 grams each) and they are a nice brown colour. Of course, the colour of the egg has no bearing on the flavour, but I think that, given the choice, most people will pick a brown egg over a white egg every time.
Chickens are usually at point-of-lay at about 21 weeks of age. Ours are about eight weeks old, so they won’t be laying until about January, 2013.
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