Spring is around the corner, and people will be starting their flocks by bringing baby chicks home from the farm store. Chickens when raised by humans lead a rather sheltered existence, when compared to hen raised chicks. Humans do a fine job of taking care of the basic needs of chicks like food and shelter, but what of the educational needs of your chicks, while they are living inside of a pen?
A chick in a pen usually has a floor of pine shavings or straw which makes a nice floor to walk on and manage the droppings, but is still a fairly bland, and sterile environment for the chicks educational development.
In our woods we found an old hollow oak tree trunk that had recently fallen, inside the trunk was dirt made up of over a hundred years of rotting wood, generations of dead bugs, fungi, and old leaf matter.
We collected this black dirt, mixed it with rich soils and mosses from around the bottoms of oak trees, and put them in roasting pans to introduce the chicks to all the stuff that they will encounter when they get old enough to graduate into the real world outside. They get a chance to scratch, taste, smell, and roll in the stuff in the roasting pans, they really enjoy the change of scene. 
Finding ways to enhance the environment of baby chicks, while they are in confinement, by using dirt trays or adding mossy branches for the chicks to play in, or nibble on, just seemed like a sensible thing to do.
When I was a chick I like rolling in forest dirt, too! I still do!
ReplyDelete