Poultry Keepers Podcast

Spring Fever Is Real -Part 1

• Rip Stalvey, John Gunterman, and Mandelyn Royal • Season 2 • Episode 92

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It’s chick season—and that springtime excitement is real. But before you load up your brooder or place another hatchery order, let’s take a moment to think it through.

In this episode of the Poultry Keepers Podcast, we’re tackling the realities of chicken math, impulse hatching, and what happens when enthusiasm outpaces preparation. Whether you’re new to poultry keeping or heading into your 10th spring with birds, this discussion will help you plan smarter and avoid common seasonal mistakes.

You’ll Hear About:

  • Why spring brings the urge to hatch (and how to manage it)
  • The unexpected costs and consequences of overcrowding
  • How to evaluate your true goals for hatching or buying chicks
  • Balancing excitement with sustainability in your flock
  • A look at what happens when we let chick fever take the wheel

This is part one of a two-part seasonal conversation designed to help you hatch with intention and keep your flock—and your sanity—in check.

#SpringChickSeason #BackyardChickens #ChickenMath #PoultryPlanning #HatchingChicks  #SustainableFlock #PoultryPodcast #ResponsibleHatching #FlockManagement  #ChickBrooderTips #EggToHen #HatchSmart #PoultryKeepers360 #PoultryEducation #FlockGoals


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Rip Stalvey:

Welcome to the Poultry Keepers Podcast. John and Mandelyn and I are with you today and we're gonna have a really good show. We're gonna be talking about spring fever and how it applies to chickens. So, Spring brings fresh energy blooming gardens, and for many of us, that irresistible urge to add new chicks to the flock. Now, whether you're hatching your own or scrolling hatchery websites. Today's episode is all about channeling that spring excitement into smart, sustainable poultry planning. We'll help you balance that spring fever with flock success so you can enjoy the spring season without getting in over your head, at least hopefully. So let's take it away guys. Let's start with this. I lost my place. Sorry about that.

John Gunterman:

That's a hard one. Let's

Rip Stalvey:

start with this hatching your own chicks. What are some of the advantage, like control over genetics, breeding goals and satisfaction of watching chicks hatch? What do you think advantage of from hatching your own birds, Madeleine?

Mandelyn Royal:

Sorry, I have to start that with a laugh because I have been struggling with spring fever when it comes to chickens and chicks since 1989. Oh, it's very

Rip Stalvey:

real.

Mandelyn Royal:

Oh boy. Early on, I could not walk into any setup that had birds and resist it. So very quickly I found myself with this flock of. Incredible diversity, two or three of everything. And when I was focusing on bans, it re, like my parents asked me to count. Keep in mind this is like an urban area and I was supposed to have about 20, and when my parents asked me to count, it came up at 53.

Rip Stalvey:

I think that's something we all go through and Yeah.

Mandelyn Royal:

Is what, three to one? Yeah, at least two. I about had a 20 bird flock if they were standardized, but they weren't. So I flexed that number out. You're okay. Chicken wrap. But that excitement level, just hearing that noise of the little peeps, I don't know what compulsion that is. It's, but I have gotten control over myself over the years

is what we've just, and now my rule

Mandelyn Royal:

is I have to hatch it. Then I slapped some breeding rules on there that if you're gonna do this, you're not hatching all willy-nilly. No ma'am. You're gonna hatch like you mean it, and you're gonna take it seriously because that's what's gonna keep you in check. So that's my, over the last couple decades, that's been my mantra of I have to do the whole thing and I have to do it correctly to keep myself within responsible parameters.

John Gunterman:

And I think you've experienced the pain of managing multiple concurrent and successive hatches as well, and the Yeah, of that's pain that

Mandelyn Royal:

made me,

John Gunterman:

it's better to have a couple of big ones than a whole lot of small ones, for instance,

Mandelyn Royal:

now some people like to hatch ongoing throughout the season, and other people like to hatch just a little early, and that's it for the year. And I have so much respect for the people who can hatch one time and be done for the year.

John Gunterman:

I, I'm trying to adopt that model. Just managing feed'cause I do, grind and mix my own feed as needed. And mixing up three or four, or now even five different formulas. Every two or three weeks because we have quail we have. Large foul Santa cla and allegedly there's some bourbon red turkeys coming soon. And each one of those has different stages of life and different feed requirements for different stages of life. And trying to manage those effectively can get overwhelming,

Mandelyn Royal:

but it's a relief when you reach the end of it.

John Gunterman:

Oh, yes. When you're all on your adult ration and you're only got two or now three'cause of turkeys, although I'm gonna do some double duty with Turkey and quail, Jeff showed me how,

Rip Stalvey:

You, to me, not only is that challenge okay, but there's. When you're hatching your own, you have to be worrying about fertility rates. How good is your incubation skills? It's, it takes a little trial and error to get to where you can hatch good numbers of chicks, and then you gotta worry about do you have the equipment, space and time? Because it is so easy to just take every egg that's laid, stick it in the incubator. Then suddenly you realize, hey, I got space for 50 chickens and I got 120 hatched.

John Gunterman:

Whoops. Yeah. Big,

Rip Stalvey:

whoops.

John Gunterman:

You look at your pen size and then behind that you look at your, rearing pens and then your brooders and I don't ever shoot for maximum capacity. cause that, I think that's pushing it,

Mandelyn Royal:

it's helpful if. You go into it with standards, even starting at the hatching egg and look at shell quality. Look at shape, look at size.

Because

Mandelyn Royal:

instead of setting all of'em, how about you go through and grade'em instead and make sure what you're putting in that incubator is worth hatching. To cut off some of that extra after hatch Yes. Of chicks that exercised, or chicks that didn't hatch that well because the egg shape wasn't quite right. You can do yourself a lot of favors by just being picky on what you actually put in that incubator.

Rip Stalvey:

And we've been talking about that for so many episodes. And I am really happy to see it. I'm getting contacted by a lot of folks that they are starting to pay attention to the hatching eggs they set.

John Gunterman:

Yeah.

Rip Stalvey:

And that, it makes me feel good that folks are saying, Hey, I think what they're saying has some merit to it.

John Gunterman:

Yeah. I've been getting a lot of questions, people sending me pictures showing, high porosity problems going, Hey, what can be causing this? And I'm like, maybe not enough calcium. I. Or if it's, across your flock, not enough calcium. If it's just one bird, don't set those eggs. Let's just let it end there.

Mandelyn Royal:

Not every layer was born to be a breeder.

Rip Stalvey:

No. Amen to that.

Mandelyn Royal:

Most of'em are breakfast egg makers. If you actually get into the little details Yeah. Of who you should be hatching from and why. Most of them should just be on breakfast duty.

John Gunterman:

If you stick to the plan that you set, your first year and then revise your second and third, hopefully you're getting things under control and you have your toll gates, you have your, I'm not setting eggs under this size or over this size, or from a, from hands under this age or over this age. There is no over, actually, by the time they've been around three or four years, you definitely want their eggs because they've proven themselves. Because you don't carry slouches.

Correct. And

Rip Stalvey:

If you're hatching your own chicks, folks, I really hope you're doing it with an eye to improving the breed.

Or preserving the breed,

Rip Stalvey:

or to building a sustainable flock. That's what it's all about to me. If I'm breeding, I need to be doing it to improve the breed and not just. Increase my numbers.

John Gunterman:

And that can be tempting this time of year and especially in the current economy. Now there's a lot of people scrambling for chicks this spring.

Mandelyn Royal:

I was totally oblivious to how intense this particular season has been going for people who are sourcing chicks because they're not breeding, they're not hatching their own, they just wanna get egg layers. And I was not prepared for what I have heard of how. That scene is right now, it's intense and it's gonna be also really temporary

John Gunterman:

this season.

Mandelyn Royal:

The ebbs and flows of the market for chicks, it varies year to year. This year is an intense year, but I want you guys to know it's temporary,

Rip Stalvey:

right? It's kinda like the whole pendulum swinging thing. It may be up on one end now, but probably in a year or so it's gonna be swung over to the other side. Don't. Don't get caught up in all the, Hey, eggs cost so much. I can save a lot of money. I gotta be honest with you, you're gonna be hard pressed to save money if you're raising your own

John Gunterman:

chicken. Here's the secret. A reason that the eggs are costing a lot in the stores is they cost a lot to make. Once you start raising your own chicken, you're gonna realize that yes.

Mandelyn Royal:

I heard that some of the farm stores were selling out in mere moments, and a lot of'em, they put a maximum number you could buy because there were people showing up buying them all. Yeah. And I've got a neighbor that blows my mind. If you're gonna show up somewhere and buy all, why would it be that farm store instead of doing a big order through a hatchery? Because there's still, when you buy from the farm stores, those chicks are shipped in. The stores do provide, a little, if you lose it, we'll replace it. But how are they gonna replace it if they don't have any on hand? Because they sold'em all. But also that shipping stress can last up to a week of when they receive those babies. So let's say the farm store receives 300, and in that initial shipment, since they did get started a little early, when it was still cold, let's say two 50, come out onto the sales floor. And then all

John Gunterman:

this constant stress of

Mandelyn Royal:

Correct. It's a lot on a little baby. It's a lot. And the juggling of hands in that first week, losses almost need to be part of the expectation because that's a lot of stress on a little bitty baby

John Gunterman:

this year. If you didn't pre-order your chicks from the local, big box stores you're not getting any, they just don't have them. I got a call from my local hardware store manager who knows that sometimes I have chicks available. He's Hey, if you've got any chicks available this year. And I'm like, no, sorry. I definitely don't. Thanks for the, yeah,

Mandelyn Royal:

I don't either

John Gunterman:

look out, but he's got people coming in there, they wanna buy chicks and he's sorry if you didn't pre-order, I've got nothing.

Mandelyn Royal:

Now in off seasons, like last year, because last year didn't have any big driving forces behind sales, so they were back to, they, back to making the bins markdowns because they have their next shipment coming in. They need those bins to be empty and that's where someone can swoop in and get everything left for 50 cents a check.

John Gunterman:

I know they're, that's not happen this year. More, they're costing more to carry, so they gotta go and make room for this small, but next season

Mandelyn Royal:

it'll probably be right back into that.

Rip Stalvey:

Yeah. And the problem with that, when they start dropping their prices, the chicks that they have left over are probably, there's a good chance they're not the best quality chicks they received. Yeah. They've, so you factor. Yeah,

Mandelyn Royal:

well, there's still just gonna be hatchery grade as hatched or whatever. We got.

John Gunterman:

True. Yeah. So you take matters in your own hands. You've got your flock. You've made your good breeding selections based upon, previous episodes of the Poultry Keepers podcast. You've got all your equipment and away you go.

Rip Stalvey:

Whether I think whether the folks are gonna buy. Chick somewhere from the big box store, from a local breeder, or they're going to hatch their own. The key takeaway to that is you need to be prepared to deal with them. You gotta have the space to the feeders, the infrastructure. Yeah. To make it all work. And it brings us first to the next point. And resisting chicken math.

Mandelyn Royal:

That's hard, but it can be done.

Rip Stalvey:

Oh, it's a killer. And let's define that when we start, what is chicken mass? I like to equate it to go into the store and say, oh, I'm just gonna buy six bullets. Oh wait, now I have 23. That happens. It can happen Just that quick. Just can, but you get excited and there's such a breed variety and. That old, impulse buying situation, it's a struggle to keep it under control. Is it not managed, but

John Gunterman:

what happens if shipping losses aren't as high as you expect? Say I ordered 72 quail eggs and nine Turkey eggs, and I expect a 50% loss just due to shipping. But,

Mandelyn Royal:

but then surprise nine times, strangely enough rate they all hatch

John Gunterman:

or 90% hatch rate. And now I go, oh no. Now what do I do?

Mandelyn Royal:

I plan for that much success. I got all these mouth

John Gunterman:

to feed and I don't have enough broer space.

Rip Stalvey:

So guys, how do we help our listeners control that chicken math urge? I think for me, the thing I would say is makeup. Plan for your flock before chick season even arrives, or at least before you go down to buy chicks.

Mandelyn Royal:

But also, if you already did make that commitment, you need to be quick and fast on staying ahead of those problems that arise from chicken math after the fact. If you,'cause this is what happens. Let's say your brooder will hold 20 chicks. For three weeks. And you accidentally put 30 in there, that means you are already on borrowed time and you're already setting yourself up for failure. Because if they get too crowded, you're gonna have problems. If that brooder gets too gross, you're gonna have problems. So if you know you have too many, get in there and clean every single day because you want to avoid. The problems that come from crowding, you need to be thinking about and immediately implementing a plan to get them into better space. Keep their air quality good. Keep everything clean before you are seeing the ramifications of the impulse

Rip Stalvey:

And goes, it's already too

Mandelyn Royal:

late. Get in there. That's right. Get your hands dirty and fix it.

Rip Stalvey:

And you gotta plan. Not just for the immediate, but those chicks are gonna be growing constantly. They're gonna be getting bigger. There's gonna be feather feathers dropping everywhere when they molt. You gotta be prepared to deal with all of those. You don't want any of that to surprise you because when you get surprised, you're already starting out behind the eight ball

Mandelyn Royal:

and

John Gunterman:

that's never a good news. So how big is your coup and your run? How many birds can you support? What do you need to cu down to in the fall? To carry through the winter?

Mandelyn Royal:

One thing I'll do to accommodate chicken math is once I start seeing my trajectory of where everybody's headed and how many I'm gonna have, I will absolutely go back into my adult pens and go who among you do I really need to be keeping? Do I have any that aren't laying as expected? Do I have any that are slacking off? Do I have any who aren't gonna be quite as good as what I have up and coming? And I'll start thinning preemptively and then consolidating and freeing up space that way. And then also, since I have a dull purpose F block, and we do eat chicken, and I'll start looking at who's ready to go into the freezer to free up space that way as well.

Rip Stalvey:

So it's a preemptive strike. Type situation for you?

Mandelyn Royal:

One, once my chicken mat starts kicking in and I start taking a look around, then I start looking at, all right, I can thin here. I can space these out. This way I can adjust for fire in case my hatch rate was way better than I thought it was gonna be. Which varies. Like even just yesterday, we had some really severe weather come through and we had a power outage right when I had eggs hatching. Our generator is primarily focused on freezer because we can't lose the food we've already put up.

No,

Mandelyn Royal:

and our generator is suitable for our household, but not the barn. So what I did was make sure I did not open any doors. I didn't change anything. They just had to ride it out the way it was. And when I got in there the morning after the storms, everyone who hatched already was perfect. Everyone who was pipped, they were shrink wrapped because the airflow stopped and the temperature got down to 84 degrees in that hatcher before power came back on and it got up where it needed to be. Everything that had not hatched or pipped, they did not. So it ended up being like a 50% loss of what should have hatched. But everyone who got out, they were just fine. And then I adjusted for fire with the results in front of me, and then I got everybody where they needed to be and then decided maybe now we need to consider battery backup or something for that hatch room. If these storms are gonna keep increasing in frequency and intensity the way they have been,'cause the 50% loss from your plan, that hurts.

To be those

Mandelyn Royal:

birds. This was intentional hatching. This was not chicken math of, oh, collect them all. No, this was, I needed those birds and now they're not here.

John Gunterman:

Last winter, I had three consecutive weeks where we had power failures a week into incubation. That lasted three days each. So scrap all them. Start over, had another power hit. We were out for three days. Start all over, had another power hit. So that put me behind a month.

Mandelyn Royal:

Yeah. I feel behind now. Of my intentional chicken math. I'm behind

John Gunterman:

This year we've got the Yeti Goal Zero solar generator and battery backup system. And our power has only flickered twice.

Rip Stalvey:

And

John Gunterman:

go figure, you

Rip Stalvey:

know, it is almost like everywhere we go. This time of year we see temptation in the form of go to the feed store for a bag of feed. Got chicks in the chick tubs. Just people, they put'em

Mandelyn Royal:

there in the main dry aisle of retail. And I know a little bit about absolute. There're also bank on you getting the water, the drinker. Sure. The bag of feed, the grit.

Yep.

Mandelyn Royal:

That whole thing is where all their the feed stores don't even really make money off those chicks.

Rip Stalvey:

No. They make

Mandelyn Royal:

their money off of everything you need for those chicks.

Rip Stalvey:

And not only is the feed store doing us in, just get online, get on Facebook. And what do you see post of those cute, little adorable, fluffy butts everywhere. And we're constantly Easter television ads bombarded with attention grabbers.

Mandelyn Royal:

Don't fall for it, especially if you cannot have a male bird where you live. If you live somewhere where you're only allowed to have pellets, just stay away from straight run. Stay away from it. Could be a boy. Just do yourself a favor and wait. Be patient for what you really need to have in your flock. If you have to have a limited flock, be careful. Be patient. Otherwise I

Rip Stalvey:

can't,

Mandelyn Royal:

you're gonna have five curing boys in the middle of the city

Rip Stalvey:

and I can't think of any better advice than that.

Mandelyn Royal:

You're probably not gonna wanna eat those boys either. And then what do you do with'em?

Rip Stalvey:

Exactly. Exactly. What about, what should we do in advance of. Getting fixed. What? What's our sort of spring fever planning routine?

Mandelyn Royal:

Setting up the brewer and make sure it holds the right temperature, not cooking'em on the first day because you put a 250 watt ball on'em, a foot and a half from the floor level, and then now they're too hot everywhere because you used a plastic tote and a bulb that was made for a barn.

John Gunterman:

Okay. First off, get plate heaters or sweeter heaters are even better. Yeah. You should, we should know these things by now. People.

Mandelyn Royal:

We should, but if your impulse buying chances are high that you're gonna have to set up a brewer in a hurry. Yeah.

John Gunterman:

Yeah. Here's the reflective dish and a 250 watt red. Plastic coated bulb and a spring clamp.

It's a fire hazard. Get scared when

John Gunterman:

I see these starter kits at the store, honestly.'cause, we've all seen the pictures and heard the stories of the coop fires and the brooder fires and it does get scary. Follow the good advice out there.

Mandelyn Royal:

Hopefully most people are going into stuff with a plan.

Hopefully.

Mandelyn Royal:

Absolutely. Fingers crossed.

Rip Stalvey:

One thing that concerns me, is that with all these chicks that are going out the door from the stores and all these chicks that are being ordered in, what's that gonna do to our feed supplies in a month, two months, three months? I don't know. I don't have the answer to that question, but it's something to think about. I don't. I don't think

John Gunterman:

the backyard poultry keeper really impacts the global feed market that much when it comes down to the overall picture. But we're gonna feel the effects of the global feed market, commodity pricing fluctuations that are, yes. Oh, it have

Rip Stalvey:

absolutely. I've seen it down here, of course, we're in. In Florida, we're pretty much a feed desert. We don't have any local meals to speak of or anything like that. We can't grow any grains down here. We have to bring everything in to make chicken feed, and I've seen a situation where they would almost have fist flights at the feed stores trying to get chickpea. Yep. Because they just couldn't get the supplies in. Sure.

Alex:

Spring chick season can be one of the most joyful parts of poultry keeping—if you plan with purpose. Whether you're hatching heritage breeds or picking up pullets, the key is knowing your limits, setting your goals, and preparing ahead. If this episode gave you a few helpful takeaways, give us a thumbs-up, share it with a fellow chicken keeper, and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss our next Poultry Keepers 360. Got a spring chick-season story or question? Drop it in the comments—we’d love to hear from you. Until next time, enjoy your birds and hatch your plans with purpose!

People on this episode

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John Gunterman

Co-host
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Mandelyn Royal

Co-host
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Rip Stalvey

Co-host