3 More Pullets Died Today

Well it appears that the learning process continues, unfortunately at the cost of more baby chicks lives. The chickens at our place are probably starting to feel like they're marked...much like the chicken on the left. We had been doing everything we'd read about with the pullets and they are now outside confined inside the coop that the normal chickens live in at night so they can start seeing each other and interacting. Well last night it jumped from about 80 to in the low 60s and apparently there were some breezes as well. Last night was one of the few nights that we didn't turn on the brooder lamp because we thought they were feathering out nicely and didn't need to have external heat anymore...apparently we were wrong.

When my wife went out to let the big chickens out of the coop this morning and let the pullets run around the coop during the day (which is our normal procedure now) she noticed a few had died. It is obvious by the condition of the dead pullets that they had all stacked onto each other trying to stay warm.

Another sad note of today's deaths is that one of the pullets that died was one that my daughter had claimed who had lost her pullet as I discussed in a previous entry. Unfortunately this is just how things come together sometimes but we've realized that we need to figure out how to have chickens breed naturally as intervention by man seems counter to how God intended it.