What is this all about?

This is a 3 day old chick being introduced to the family.  Early frequent handling leads to calm, curious chooks that can become part of their 'forever home' family.

Earlier today I watched Alice catch mozzies and flies in her beak, then whenever a chick emerged from inside her feathery shroud she would feed it the dead insect. Sometimes she would hold it for more than ten minutes, waiting for a tiny hungry head to appear.

Which kind of gets me to the point of this blog...

While studying towards a Master of Sustainability I was busy weighing the food intake of chooks; examining the food preferences of different breeds; and counting and measuring egg output in an effort to determine which breed was the most sustainable.

While watching I discovered that chooks learn from one another!

The mothers 'teach' their chicks good or bad behaviours -- which they then pass on to their chicks.

Chicks hatched in incubators don't stand a chance. 

In fact now that I am aware of how social chooks are, I regard incubators as abuse. Chicks are churned out in their thousands and sent to live in gardens around Australia without ever having been near a mother hen.

Imagine handing over day old pups to their new owner saying, "Here's a bottle. Feed it a few times a day and it'll be right." It would never happen because we know puppies get more than milk from their mother.  They are taught how to behave; what is and isn't socially acceptable in dog circles; how to be cautious and recognise risks.

I hope through reading this blog over the coming months more people come to realise the same is true for chooks.

The little flocks I provide have been raised by mothers with good sustainable habits. In the first 6 weeks of life they work hard to pass those skills on to their chicks.

Here is a great mum, Salt & Pepper, giving a five week old dust bath lessons this morning.

She has shown this chick before but we have had a lot of rain so finding a patch of dry dirt was difficult. First she showed it how to push back the newspaper mulch.

Then they frolicked around in it for an hour.

Chooks can be taught much like dogs. Anyone with chooks knows they soon learn the sound of their food being prepared and dash towards it (I would not go so far as to say they salivate but Pavlov would have been proud of them).

So to make a more sustainable chook, my breeding program over the past eight years has involved selecting for behaviour rather than genetics.

I don't really care whether a hen's comb is the right shape or not according to the "standard" -- I care if that hen scratches the ground lightly and covers the whole yard when it searches for insects. I choose her to be the mother of the next generation over a hen who stands still and scratches down to the roots of the plant in the same spot day after day until she kills it.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow, I'll even get up early. Day 4 is a very special day for my chicks.