Chick Adoption- The Beginner's Guide.
Step 1: You will need to have a hen who can adopt the chicks. She needs to already be broody. Ideally, she should have been broody for at least a week and have been moved and settled into her new home (e.g. Brooder Box) for a few days to be she remains broody before introducing the chicks. Some hens will snap out of their broodiness once moved. How to decide which hen to use if you have more than one broody? In my first and only attempt at Chick Adoption thus far, I chose not to use Matilda, my bantam Wyandotte who regularly goes broody and remains so for days (a week +) after being moved because I was worried she would kill our chicks. She is very aggressive when broody and my instinct was telling me that she was very unlikely to be a mother to chicks that she had not hatched. See my blog about her pecking cardboard! Instead, I gave the chicks to Fleur, one of our Belgium Bantams. Fleur is a lovely timid hen but I was taking a risk as this was her first time being broody and she had only been broody for 3 days. My concern was that she would abandon the chicks.
Step 2: Make sure you have a Brooder Box set up to receive the chicks if the broody hen fails to adopt the chicks. I had a makeshift brooder box/very warm room that I used to house the chicks when I received them first. My intention was that I would move the chicks to a proper Brooder Box once I had fixed the broken heat lamp in the Brooder Box. However, a power outage forced me to try Chick Adoption instead. My backup if the adoption process failed that night was to cuddle the chicks until the power came back on!
Step 3: Introduce the chicks to the hen. Typically you would do this at night in darkness so the hen thinks her eggs have hatched and hen/chicks are sleepy. This, for me, was a nerve-wrecking process for many reasons. Firstly, counter to standard advice I moved Fleur into the Brooder Box about 30 min before I introduced the chicks to her. I was forced to do this due to the power outage. Thankfully the makeshift brooder room held the warmth during this time so the chicks did not get cold. Secondly, I did the hen and chick introductions in a lit garage- not overly bright but definitely well enough to see everything and everyone. I placed the chicks, one by one, under Fleur's wing. But only after testing her receptiveness to the chicks by placing the first chick under her wing and waiting 5 min. I did this firstly to see if she would reject the chick and secondly whether the chick would accept her new mom. The chick, I suspect, stayed under her wing due to the warmth radiating from Fleur. A clear indication that all was well with the first introduction was the lack of cheeping from the chick. When I went back after 5 min, the chick was quiet and nestled under her new mom. I did check to make sure Fluer had not crushed the chick by lifting her wing very gently.