Feeding Baby Chicks: A Letter From Six Months in the Future

Dear Tom of six months ago,

You're currently standing in your kitchen, staring at a cardboard box from the post office that's vibrating. It sounds like it contains a hundred tiny, furious alarm clocks. You think you've made a lovely, sustainable lifestyle choice for the twins, bringing a touch of the rural good life to our damp London postcode. You haven't. You've brought incredibly fragile, dust-producing dinosaurs into a semi-detached house, and your life is about to get significantly more complicated.

Right now, your biggest concern is whether the dog will try to eat them, but let me save you from the real nightmare. The actual crisis is figuring out what to put in their tiny, demanding beaks without inadvertently causing a digestive catastrophe. Because as it turns out, a baby chick is effectively a delicate chemistry experiment covered in fluff.

The absolute panic of the first drink

Before we even talk about food, we need to talk about water. I genuinely didn't know this, but when you first get baby chicks, they're so exhausted and dehydrated from transit that water is the only thing that matters. They also have absolutely zero survival instincts and are extremely top-heavy, which is a disastrous combination.

If you just put a standard bowl of water down, they'll fall face-first into it, realize they can't get back up, and drown in half an inch of liquid. It's ridiculous. You have to fill a shallow dish with marbles or clean pebbles so the water sits in the gaps between the stones. They drink from the cracks like tiny, feathered prospectors. Finding marbles in a house with two-year-old twins is an extreme sport in itself, but it has to be done.

Also, they literally don't know what water is. When you take them out of the box, you've to physically dip each of their beaks into the water to show them. I spent an hour doing this while Lily tried to climb into the brooder box and Mia screamed because one of the birds looked at her funny. Just let them drink for two solid hours before you even think about introducing dry food, or their little systems just short-circuit.

Food stages explained by an exhausted man

You'd think bird seed is just bird seed. It isn't. The bloke at the farm supply store explained the nuances to me, but honestly, I was distracted by the sheer volume of manure smell in the shop, so here's my imperfect understanding of the three-stage nutritional gauntlet.

For the first eight weeks, they need "chick starter feed." It looks exactly like coarse sand and is packed with about twenty percent protein. They need this because they basically double their body weight every few days, which is horrifying when you really think about it. You just leave it out constantly. For the first few days, put it in the bottom of a clean cardboard egg carton. They instinctively peck at the ground, and the egg carton helps them figure out that this sand-like substance is actually dinner. They eat an ounce or two a day and supposedly won't overeat, unlike the twins who will consume their own body weight in blueberries if left unsupervised.

Then, from eight to eighteen weeks, you switch to grower feed. I think of this as teenager food. It has slightly less protein, presumably so their internal organs don't grow faster than their skeletons and fail. I just followed the bag's instructions blindly.

Whatever you do, don't give them layer feed—the stuff for adult hens—until they're actually laying eggs. My vet casually mentioned that the high calcium in layer feed causes fatal kidney stones in babies. That's terrifying information to just casually drop on a person who's already running on four hours of sleep and cold coffee. Keep the layer feed out of the house entirely.

The medicated feed dilemma

I walked into the feed shop feeling incredibly smug about my organic, holistic parenting journey. I was going to buy the purest, most natural unmedicated grain available for our new flock. Then the shop assistant mentioned the word Coccidiosis.

It's a parasitic intestinal disease that's apparently the number one killer of these little fluffy things. I immediately abandoned all my sustainable principles and bought the medicated feed. It contains something called Amprolium, which sounds like an element from a sci-fi film but basically stops them from dying of a parasite. If the hatchery vaccinated them before shipping, you can use unmedicated feed. Ours weren't, and I simply didn't have the emotional bandwidth to monitor chick droppings for signs of blood while simultaneously changing double the toddler nappies.

Someone on a backyard poultry forum also told me to put a splash of raw Apple Cider Vinegar in their water. I've no idea if the science actually holds up, but apparently, it makes their gut flora more robust and boosts immunity. It mainly just makes my kitchen smell like a pub carpet, but they haven't died yet, so I keep doing it.

Treats and the terrifying concept of grit

The twins will desperately want to feed them treats. It's a lovely image in your head—two toddlers gently offering strawberries to baby chicks in the spring sunshine. The reality is a chaotic throwing of food while screaming.

But here's the catch: if you give a baby chick anything other than their commercial starter feed, you've to give them "chick grit." Since chickens don't have teeth (a fact I knew but hadn't deeply considered in terms of digestion), they need tiny stones in their stomach to grind up solid food. If they eat grass or a piece of apple without grit, their crops get impacted. It sounds like a traffic jam in their throat and is, you guessed it, fatal.

Keep treats to less than ten percent of their diet. Mashed hard-boiled eggs are brilliant for them. It feels weirdly cannibalistic to feed them eggs, but they go absolutely mad for it and it's supposedly great for their immune health. Oatmeal is fine too.

Never let them near dried beans, avocado skins, tomato leaves, or onions. I'm pretty sure half the things in our fridge are highly toxic to them. Iceberg lettuce gives them severe diarrhea, which, trust me, you absolutely don't want to clean out of a cardboard box in your kitchen while your two-year-olds point and laugh.

The indignity of pasty butt

It sounds like a terrible joke, but it's not. If they get stressed, or if their feed isn't quite right, or if the heat lamp is slightly too hot, their droppings stick to their rear end and dry like cement. It literally seals them shut. You then have to hold a frantic, chirping fluff-ball under a warm tap and gently massage its backside with a damp cotton wool ball until it clears.

Page 47 of the chicken-keeping manual suggests you remain calm during this process, which I found deeply unhelpful at 3am while covered in wet chick dust. Diet plays a huge part in preventing this—which is another reason to strictly avoid iceberg lettuce and stick to the proper starter mash.

The equipment crossover

As a stay-at-home dad trying to keep both the human babies and the bird babies alive simultaneously, boundaries inevitably get blurred.

We got the Wild Western Play Gym Set with Horse & Buffalo for the twins' room, mostly because I liked the irony of a rugged prairie aesthetic in a damp London semi. It's honestly brilliant. The wooden buffalo and the little teepee are beautifully carved, and the contrasting crochet textures keep the girls occupied for solid twenty-minute stretches. It gives me exactly enough time to change the pine shavings in the brooder box without "help." I genuinely love this thing; it feels like an heirloom rather than a plastic eyesore.

If you're looking for things to distract your children while you scrub bird waterers, browse Kianao's collection of wooden toys that don't chirp.

Then there's the Silicone Baby Spoon and Fork Set. It's perfectly fine for its actual purpose—the girls use them for yogurt and mashed potatoes—but in a moment of sheer desperation when I couldn't find the proper feed scoop, I used the spoon to portion out chick starter. It really worked perfectly because the soft silicone didn't scrape the bottom of the plastic feed bin and wake the babies. The twins caught me doing it, and now they insist the green spoon is exclusively "for the birds," which is a whole separate negotiation at mealtime.

For treating the chicks, we started putting their mashed egg on the Baby Silicone Plate. The suction base is meant to stop toddlers from throwing their dinner on the floor, but it also remarkably stops the chicks from standing on the edge of the bowl and flipping it over into the wood shavings. It's a solid win, even if eating off a bear's face confuses the birds slightly.

Before your toddlers decide to share their lunch with the flock, shop our safe, silicone feeding essentials to keep human food where it belongs.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I feed my birds table scraps?

No, unless you want a disaster on your hands. I thought chickens were living garbage disposals, but the babies have incredibly delicate digestive systems. If it's not mashed egg, plain oatmeal, or chopped strawberries (and only if you're also providing grit in a separate bowl), don't risk it. The diarrhea alone isn't worth it.

Do they really need the medicated feed?

Look, I'm all for natural living, but Coccidiosis is brutal. Unless your hatchery specifically vaccinated them against it, just buy the medicated feed. It saves you from analyzing their poop for blood every morning, which is a terrible way to start your day before you've even had a cup of tea.

What happens if I run out of chick starter feed?

You panic, obviously. But seriously, don't substitute it with adult layer feed. The calcium will destroy their tiny kidneys. If you're completely out, you can scramble an egg or mash up some plain oats as an emergency ration until the shops open, but get them back on their high-protein starter feed as fast as humanly possible.

How do I get them to stop kicking their food everywhere?

You don't. It's their literal instinct to scratch at the ground while they eat. I spent a week trying to invent a spill-proof feeder before accepting defeat. The best you can do is elevate the feeder slightly on a block of wood once they're a few weeks old so it sits at their chest height.

Why do they drink so much water?

Because they're basically tiny sponges made of feathers and anxiety. They drink twice as much water as they eat feed. If their water runs dry for even a few hours under that heat lamp, they go downhill shockingly fast. Check it constantly, and enjoy fishing out the pine shavings they inevitably kick into it every five minutes.