Beheading Meal Worms

Variety is the spice of life, or so they say. I was thinking about the baby chickens and how they have to eat that boring old chick food all day long, they've got to be getting pretty sick of it. So I got online and found a very informative chicken forum (yes, there are forums devoted purely to raising chickens...who knew). There was a thread on the forum about snacks you can give chicks. Bingo, I thought! The three biggest treats that people recommended were: hard boiled egg, crickets and meal worms. Yea, the hard boiled egg kind of caught me off guard...isn't that sort of cannibalistic? Oh well, it was worth a try. But first I tried the crickets and meal worms. Sean works directly across the street from one of the major chain pet stores so I asked him nicely if he could go get some for me. He went in there expecting to just pick up a box of crickets and a tub of meal worms. Turns out they sold the crickets per cricket. Did you all know this? Ten cents a cricket, you just tell them how many you want and they bag em up. So he got 25, that seemed like enough. He got home and we dumped all of the crickets in there at once. At first the chicks didn't have a clue as to what to do. That is until one pecked one and got it in it's mouth. Then they all proceeded to run after this poor chick who was peeping madly and trying to keep it's prize all to itself. Then all it took was about 8 seconds for the rest of the crickets to get gobbled down. It was cool.

Then came the meal worms. Meal worms come in a little plastic tub in a refridgerated case in the pet stores. They are nasty little worms. The worst part about feeding meal worms to chicks is that I read you're supposed to cut off their little heads before prior to feeding them. Something about the worms being able to latch on to the chicks stomachs? I'm not real sure, but it was enough to scare me into getting a knife and cutting board out and beheading a pile of worms. Let's just say it's not something I plan to do again. Yuckers. It was a lot of work and the chicks didn't even really care about the worms.

Now, last was the hard boiled egg. Oh. My. Gosh. These chicks absolutely FREAK OUT over hard boiled eggs. I boil up five or six eggs a week and give them one almost every day. I just crumble it up on a dish and put it in their brooder. It takes about five seconds and a lot of bocking and the egg is history. It's so much fun to watch I added a short video.