A Mighty Mix of Chicks

The call came around 7:30 this morning: The chicks
were at the post office and off I went to collect them. As soon as I entered the lobby, I could hear the peeping. The business part of the P.O. was still closed, so I hollered through a mail slot that I had come for the chicks. The postmistress turned them over to me with a sigh of relief -- that incessant peeping can wear you right down and what with the general edginess attributed to postal workers anyway . . .


It was a group order: I was expecting 8 Ameruacana and 4 Gold Laced Wyandottes; my friend and her daughter had requested Brown Leghorns, Rhode Island Reds, Black Australians, more Ameruacanas, and a neighbor of theirs had asked for 25 straight run Cornish Games -- 50 chicks in all. And the hatchery had assured my friend, who placed the order, that the chicks would be labeled -- which they were -- sort of.

When I got the box back to my husband's workshop where he had set up a nice brooder with lamps to keep the babies warm, and feeders and a waterer, we were faced with a dilemma: the other folks couldn't come for their chicks till tomorrow and we didn't have a good way of keeping them separate, even if we'd been sure which chick was which. There were chicks in the various sections of the box and the sections were labeled -- but there weren't 25 Cornish Games where they should be; they seemed to have oozed into the other sections.

I was pretty sure which were the Rhode Island Reds and the Black Australians but after that . . . and the babies were peeping and ready to be Out of the Box. So . . . we turned them out. All together. A mighty mix of chicks. Tomorrow we'll have a great chick round up and sort them out as best we can and send them on where they belong. I'll keep what I think are 8 Ameruacanas and what I can only guess might be 4 Gold Laced Wyandottes. There may be swapping later on, as the biddies develop and reveal their breeds. But for today, there's just a whole lot of peeping going on.