Chicks
11 February 2007
Click to watch the baby chicks. (8.4 MB)
February may not normally be considered spring but here on the Kona coffee
farm it's close enough. The weather is warm, coffee trees are blooming
and we have 10 new baby chickens. There's nothing like a flock of baby
chicks to make it feel like spring.
With a lack of natural predators, there are a surplus of wild chickens
here in Hawaii. Our previous flock of chickens
(they're still doing fine) came from a local poultry farm
that was closing. Those chickens
are specially bred for laying big, beautiful eggs. These baby chickens
came from the Humane Society. We put our name on the list for people
willing to adopt a chicken or rooster. Within a couple days they called
us with a flock of 10 baby chicks. With so many wild chickens
running around the island, they have a difficult time placing all the
chickens that are handed in. We don't know yet how many are hens
and how many are roosters.
We currently are keeping the chicks in our bathtub. It's a safe
place where the dogs, cats and mongoose can't get at them. They
grow so fast it won't be long before they're ready to live outside full
time. The first day we got them the girls had to go to school,
when they got back that afternoon they were certain the chicks had
grown.
During the day we'll sometimes take the chicks outside. They get
straight to work scratching the ground and looking for bugs. The
adult chickens do a decent job of keeping the weeds down among the
coffee trees. Some organic farms in Kona even use geese to try to
control the weeds. We couldn't possibly raise enough chickens and
geese to control the weeds among all of our coffee. So we'll be
happy with a few eggs and if we get any extra weed control, that's a
bonus.
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