Meat Birds

Dave had been in the barn all week building brooders in anticipation of our new, fluffy, yellow, chirpy arrivals: 50 meat birds from the local Co-op.

He had built a large, double-decker brooder in the shop that would comfortably house the 50 of them. For the first week or so.

Inside those he designed little heat boxes that the chicks could run under when they were cold, or run out of if they got too warm. The boxes act more like a mother hen would, not constantly smothering them in heat, but there to accept them “under their wings” and warm them when they were too cold.

Dave had built a couple of them in Ontario, and they managed to keep our baby chicks alive even through a very harsh Ontario winter.

Since then, we’ve considered them a win.

Look at those happy fluffy mcnuggets!

This was all well and good, until we got the call from the Co-op and showed up to collect our package of happily chirping chicks.

As we were picking up our little brown box, the owner of the store began telling us how they had accidentally ordered too many meat birds. A number was inverted on a spreadsheet, and suddenly they had 300 meat birds too many.

They asked, if they couldn’t sell them by the end of the day, if we’d want some extras as they would likely just die over night.

We immediately thought about the brooder waiting at home and wondered if there was any way we could make it work. We went home and set to work, but it wasn’t long before we got a call to come back.

We braced for how many little faces would peer up at us when we walked through the door.

40. They had actually managed to sell most of them, and were just looking for homes for 40 extra little chickens.

That wasn’t so bad. We could have tight quarters for a day while we built another brooder!

We took the 40 extra chickens home happily.

As we started to build extra space for those little chicks, we remembered, in about one month’s time, we were also going to be taking home 50 meat chicks from Nova Scotia.

Looks like we’re going to be planning some very chicken-y recipes for the foreseeable future!