FORT KENT, Maine — Call it a case of extreme carpooling.
Bright and early Thursday morning Janice Bouchard was on her way back to Fort Kent from Caribou with 1,200 day-old chicks in her car destined for her Bouchard’s Country Store.
“When Janice called from the road, you could really hear them in the background,” said Shelly Spiers, who was volunteering as a chick nanny on Thursday. “They are cute, but it’s been nonstop care since they got here.”
Shipped 25 per box within hours of being born from Mt. Healthy Hatchery in Ohio, the chicks traveled by U.S. mail to Aroostook County.
“They are born and shipped the same day,” Bouchard said. “They have a couple of days where they can survive on the nutrients they have at birth, but they are hungry and thirsty by the time they get here.”
Bouchard orders chicks twice per year in spring and later in the summer. As soon as they arrive at the farm store, Bouchard and Spiers unpack the chicks and place them according to variety in wood pens equipped with heat lamps.
After that, it’s electrolyte-infused water and chick food all around.
“Then I start calling people and ask them to please come get their chicks,” said Bouchard, who runs the store with her husband, Joe Bouchard. “I am hoping most will be gone by the end of today.”
The cost is between $2.50 and $3.50 per bird, depending on how many people purchase, she said.
About 90 percent of the birds are pre-sold before getting to Fort Kent, but she said she always orders extra for people who decide at the last minute they want to keep chickens for eggs or meat.
“I love the fresh eggs,” Linda Picard of Frenchville said as she and her husband, Ronnie, stopped in to pick up their 75 fuzzy chicks. “Once you eat fresh eggs, there’s no going back to store-bought.”
Like all human parents of baby chicks, the Picards will take the newest members of their flock home to a brooder — like a chicken nursery room — where a heat lamp will keep things at a chick-comfortable 100 degrees.
Once their feathers come in, the chicks will be moved to more spacious quarters until they are large enough to relocate to the permanent coop.
Customers had been coming in all Thursday morning to pick up their chicks, chick food and other supplies.
In between customers, Janice Bouchard and Spiers were dispensing food and clean water with electrolytes and gently “rotating” the chicks as they clustered in corners under the heat lamps.
“They can group in too closely together,” Spiers said. “They can get hurt that way if we don’t keep an eye on them.”
For the better part of Thursday morning, customers and staff alike at Bouchard’s Country Store had to speak in raised voices to be heard above noise created by 1,200 chicks all peeping at the same time.
Pretty evenly split between egg-laying hens and meat producing birds, Bouchard segregates the chicks in their pens by breed and gender.
“If you get laying hens, the males are good for nothing,” she said with a laugh. “They are really not that even good for meat or canning.”
Some customers prefer all males or all females when it comes to the chicks destined for freezers or canning jars, she said, while others say gender is immaterial to the ultimate tastiness of the fowl.
“This is our third year doing this,” she said. “The first year we put them in kiddie wading pools with the heat lamps overhead.”
They key to healthy birds is rapid transport from the hatchery to Fort Kent, Bouchard said.
“Our postmaster, Rudy St. Peter, is awesome,” she said. “He does an amazing job tracking them after they are shipped and making sure they are moving, and they know all the way to Ohio and back the chicks are on the way.”
Any hold up along the way can have an adverse effect on the chicks.
“An extra day can really be a matter of life and death for them,” Bouchard said, adding that the overall health of the 1,200 new arrivals was very good.
“We will probably lose around 10 of them,” she said. “It’s always sad when any don’t make it.”
Bouchard is aware of the nationwide concern over the avian flu outbreak in the midwest, but she said that so far it has not been detected in Ohio where her chicks were born.
Still, she said people need to practice good hygiene when handling chicks to avoid salmonella germs that can be carried on live poultry and transferred through handling to humans.
“You want to wash your hands with soap and water after handling the chicks,” she said, as she counted out a customer’s order and placed the chicks into a box, with her usual extra chick thrown in for good measure.
“All set with food and electrolytes?” she asked, handing the peeping box over. “There go 50 more, only 800 to go.”
Bouchard knows some people won’t be able to come to get their chicks before the weekend.
In fact, she’s counting on it and does not mind a bit of barnyard babysitting.
Bouchard’s Country Store’s annual petting zoo is from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday, and she said the fluffy chicks will go well with the planned baby bunnies, goats, lambs and calf that will be there.
By noon, the peeping volume had dropped noticeably with many of the chicks on the way to their new homes.
“But we are not done yet,” Bouchard said. “We have 100 turkeys arriving tomorrow and then another 250 chicks in June.”
