Chickies!!! :D :D

Grown chickens may be terrifying, but nothing is cuter then a day-old chick. About 3 times a year Farmer Mark gets a batch of new chicks to raise that will replace the oldest chickens on the farm (how can you tell they are the oldest chickens on the farm?....well, most of them are pretty much so featherless that they begin to look like the chicken you find in the supermarket...only these will still murder you in the night.)

So to replace the increasingly ugly and unproductive chickens, Farmer Mark gets new cute little baby chickens. On Thursday, September 1st, 1200 chicks arrived at Papanui Farm and we all fell in love. After unloading boxes and boxes filled with little, fluffy, cheeping angel birds, the three of us just sat in their pen and cuddled chicks.

I've decided that even though chickens are evil creatures,

I

LOVE

CHICKS

SOOOOO MUCHHHH!!!!!

...and they love me!


The chicks need to live in a perfect environment in order to avoid dieing. This means that the temperature in their enclosure needs to just right....somewhere between 26*C and 30*C. Farmer Mark has set up this temperature warning system that monitors the warmth of the enclosure and sends out a warning alarm if it is too cold or too warm.

This is literally what the alarm is:

And this could ring at all hours...

Well, this weekend Farmer Mark had to leave the farm and decided to give us 3 radios that would broadcast an alarm if the chicks needed attention. I have to say, Adeline and I slept perfectly all weekend - not once did the alarm wake us up....but that was probably because Bastiaan was so concerned with making sure we didn't cook or freeze any of the chicks to death, that he basically began caring for them like they were his fluffy, cheepy babies.

....I think one night he was up three times to check the chicks after having terrible dreams that they were all dead. All 1200. Just dead.

And it was quite considerate of him to turn down the alarm so it didn't wake Adeline and I up.

Now after 2 long nights (for Bastiaan) Farmer Mark is back and he returns to most of his chicks (minus a couple here or there...)


Elise