Friday, May 16, 2014

Feeding Trials Begin: Chicken Wrangling and Boss Boots

Chickens are a lot of work. My advisor and I spent three hours this afternoon measuring out feed from the trash cans into equal 25-pound measures (this is the feed that we mixed on Tuesday), distributing it into the feeders located in the new pens (four pens for each experimental diet), then randomly dividing the chicks into groups of ten, weighing them, and placing them in the new pens.

While "random" is ideal, it is hard to achieve. I am very glad nobody had a video camera trained on me while I was trying to catch 10 chicks and put them in a plastic bin then carry them to the scale for weighing. The little buggers are pretty fast at 5 days of age. And they get pretty vocal if you grab them too roughly. Thankfully, they are too small to peck much. Just wait, everyone says, the pecking will come (note to self: purchase leather gloves to be used only in the chicken pens). The random selection task was made all the more difficult because the pens are kept at 80F with those propane heaters--pretty toasty. Turns out the smaller ones are much easier to catch! My first four groups of ten weighed a lot less than the other eight groups, so we had to do some reallocation at the end to even things out. More catching and binning and weighing.

To her credit, my advisor made me do all the hard work. She presented me with a written protocol for the afternoon so all I had to do was check off each step. She recorded all of the data but I was the one hauling all the feed and buckets and chicks around. That's as it should be. It's her grant money and her name will go on the publication(s) but it's my thesis research. If I didn't contribute at the front end, I can certainly do my share here in the execution.

The chicks were exhausted by all the excitement, and after taste-testing their new diets and getting a sip of water, most of them took a nap. I have to check on them daily so hopefully tomorrow they will be more perky.

As I have said before, I rarely plug specific products but I must put in a thumbs-up for the boots I wear in the chicken barns: Dr. Martens Work 2295 Rigger that I bought from zappos.com nearly 10 years ago (you'll have to look them up yourself; zappos doesn't play well with the product links). No laces to trip or snag, decent padding around the ankles, steel-toed, nice leather, and chemical-resistant soles. I originally bought them to be safety compliant when I visited drilling sites. They are stylish, super easy to pull on (and pry off), fit pretty true to size, and aren't too heavy (given that there is a collar of solid steel over your toes). I think it's funny that boots that protected me from injury on an oil rig also protect me from injury and contamination in the poultry barn.

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