I was inspired by Patti Moreno, aka, The Garden Girl, from www.gardengirltv.com to look into raising bantam chickens. Actually, she inspired me to do some organic gardening and I know that her flock of 8 bantams are pivotal to her successful gardening. So, I read some books, looked around online and decided that bantam chickens were something that we could do. Surprisingly, my husband Tom was easy to convert to my new idea and we decided to forge ahead.
Looking around online, I found several different websites that sold day old chicks, but www.mypetchicken.com was the only one that would ship as few as 3 chicks at a time (most others had a minimum order of 15) and offered sexed chickens instead of just "straight-run", which is a random mix of pullets and cockerels. So after looking at the different bantam breeds available, I decided that silkies would be my first choice. I checked out the ordering process and found out that they could ship as early as the following Monday. I chose two white silkies but quickly found out that the earliest they could ship out was July 27, 2009; a full 10 weeks away! I was disappointed and didn't really want to wait that long, so I decided to go with a mixed assortment of exotic bantams instead. They promised at least 4 different breeds with my order of 6, and they would ship out the following Monday. They ship them using Express Mail from the good old Post Office promising they will arrive by Thursday.
In the meantime, we got all of our supplies together. My youngest son, Jaron and I went up to the local farm supply store and picked out a feeder, a watering can, some chick starter feed, some hardware cloth, a warming lamp, a pitch fork and some sun shade. Then I took my oldest son, Don, to the pet store for some wood shavings and some Timothy Hay for bedding and stopped to pick up a nice big plastic tote that you could see through for their luxury chicken nursery.
Jaron's class has been hatching chicken eggs for the last few days and the teacher has asked for volunteers to keep the new chicks over night. Feeling very confident in our ability to care for newborn chicks I happily said we'd do it. We cared for the 10 class chickens on Tuesday evening and sent them back to class on Wednesday morning at 8am. The post office called me at 8:30am on Wednesday morning to tell me that my new chicks had arrived. I went to pick them up and the clerk told me that they enjoy it when new chicks come in and that they were happily keeping them warm under a desk lamp until my arrival.
Having just spent the last 16 hours taking care of standard sized baby chicks, I was ill prepared for what was within the package. I believe when I opened the box I actually let out a little gasp and squealed, "Oh God! You are SO CUTE!!" The first thing I noticed was that they all looked different from one another and they were about half the size of the standard sized chicks. 2 of them were no bigger than a silver dollar. As I hurried to get them into the nursery to warm them up and give them some much needed food and water, I knew that I was instantly in love!
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