I have to elaborate more on some of these pictures. Last Tuesday Abe, a videographer from the Texas Parks and Wildlife show came to the refuge to film us. He came once before during booming season to film the males perform their courtship ritual and to film us building nest fences. This time around we had little prairie chicks. Abe videotaped us measuring, weighing prairie chicks and moving their brood boxes. Later that day he followed Matt and I during one of our bug collecting run where he asked us questions about our job and how we felt about it. I was very nervous about having a camera almost 6 inches from my face and being asked prairie chicken questions.
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| Light, camera, chickens! |
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| The Polaris and the bug collectors (Thing #1 and Thing #2) |
The insect collectors. Everyday we take the Polaris ATV and hitch it onto the two bug collectors. The collectors are supposed to be used for collecting grass seeds but we've converted it for insects. The rotating brushes of the collectors sweep up insects from high grass. We sweep everyday in a low lying marsh regions that has yielded good insect numbers. With 4 brood boxes we need to collect about 35 bags of insects everyday. Each bag must contain about 200 insects each. Thats about 7000 insects that we mush find everyday! We also give a couple of bags of store bought crickets to supplement their diet. These are very hungry chicks!
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| Bag of collected insects-will later be fed to chicks |
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| Baby prairie chickens! |
Every two days we go out to the brood boxes in the morning to take a count, weigh and move brood boxes for the chicks. The goal in brood boxing the hen and her chicks and feeding them insects everyday is to get them to an appropriate weight before we release them into the wild. Newborn chicks weight about 17-20 grams at hatch. Within the two weeks that we brood box and feed them they must gain about 30 grams to stand a good chance of survival after release. Every time we weight them we are looking for a 10% gain. So far only some of these chicks are gaining the appropriate weight, most of them are underweight so we've upped the insects for a couple of brood boxes. We release our first two brood boxed (22) chicks this Monday!
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| Who can resist? |
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| Awwwz |
what's the total count on new additions?
ReplyDeleteI think as of as of Sunday: 35 chicks in 4 brood boxes. At least 5 other nests have hatched but we've released them and do not have a chick count on them. We will know in a couple weeks once we track the released broods down and radio collar the chicks at night.
ReplyDeletewhy do they released the chicks so early? keep them a bit longer will make them safe from other like hawks, snake, coyotes,..? is there fence around?
ReplyDeleteBo
Oh My, Oh my. They are SOOO cute!
ReplyDeleteWere the two brood boxes released growing faster then the others? Or were they already bigger from birth?
So does this mean I should be looking out for you on the Texas Parks and Wildlife show?! Exciting!
~Raq.E
We keep the chicks in the brood boxes until they are all around 50 grams or about 2 weeks old. There are lots of predators out to get them- snakes, hawks, owls and many more but we gave them the best head start we could. It is up to their mother and natural prairie chicken instincts to survive. We will be monitoring the position of the mother hen and keeping track of chick numbers for the next couple of weeks until they are about 6 weeks old and large enough to carry a radio collar. After their early morning feeding, we released two broods from their boxes this morning- they were the first two to be boxed and the first to be released from it. There are 2 more hens & chicks in brood boxes.
ReplyDeleteYes, I was filmed for an episode/short film(?) of Texas Parks & Wildlife about the APCNWR and the chickens. It is still in production but I'll let y'all know when/if it airs!
more updates!
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