Cackle Hatchery Chick Ship Dates and Store Pickup Dates

Baby chick ship dates and Cackle Hatchery® store pickup dates change with each calendar year. For this year’s ship dates, consult our Chick Season® calendar.

Chick Ship Dates

We hatch and ship baby chicks from February through September. To avoid weekend layovers at the post office, we ship on Mondays and Wednesdays. We make exceptions for postal holidays.

The United States Postal Service delivers 98% of all chick or hatching egg orders on the second day after we ship them. Therefore, if your chicks ship on Monday, they should arrive at your local post office on Wednesday morning. If they ship on Wednesday, they should arrive at your local post office on Friday morning.

We include multiple phone numbers with your order. That’s so your local post office can call you as soon as your chicks arrive. A good idea is to notify your carrier ahead of time when you are expecting chicks.

You should receive a phone call early on the morning you are expecting chicks or hatching eggs. If not, please call your post office to find out if they arrived.

If at all possible, claim your chicks or eggs at the post office and bring them straight home. Yes, your carrier can and will deliver them. But the increased travel time exposes them to the risk of excessive jostling and/or extreme cold or heat. In fact, in July and August we temporarily suspend hatching egg shipments, because exposure to high heat reduces hatchability.

Chick Availability

The natural breeding season determines the Chick Season for each type of poultry. Therefore our 202 species and breeds are not available year around.

Furthermore, most of our baby chicks go to customers who reserve a specific ship date and pay in advance. When you place your order and pay for it, we take those expected chicks off the market. That’s why some dates sell out well ahead of time.

From October through January we ship only a few types of baby chicks and hatching eggs. We do, however, continue to ship poultry supplies and grown fowl during those months.

Store Pickup Dates

If you pre-order chicks you plan to pick up at the Cackle Hatchery store, your pick up date is the day after your reserved hatch date. So if your hatch date is a Monday, you must pick up your chicks the next day (Tuesday) between 9:00 a.m. and 5:00 p.m. For rare exceptions we may allow pick-up of Monday’s chicks early on Wednesday morning.

The same goes for a Wednesday hatch date. Chicks must be picked up on Thursday. Only in a rare circumstance will we hold chicks for pickup on Friday morning.

For the comfort and survival of your baby chicks, it is essential that you get them home by noon on either Wednesday or Friday. And they must go straight into your pretested and prewarmed brooder. Treat baby chicks picked up at the store the same way you would care for chicks shipped by mail.

Visit Our Store

Some customers prefer not to preorder baby chicks. If you would rather take a drive to our store in Lebanon, Missouri, to see what’s available, here are some tips:

Your best chances of finding a good selection of chicks are on Tuesday mornings from 9:00 a.m. to noon and on Thursday mornings from 9:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. At those times we offer surplus chicks left over from the previous day’s shipments.

Sometimes on those days Cackle Hatchery offers amazing sales. Special sales apply on those days only. And all items on sale must be paid for and taken home that day.

We keep a few chicks in the brooder all week. But the breed selection is nowhere near what you would find on Tuesday and Thursday mornings.

A lot of customers like to stop by Cackle Hatchery on a Saturday. But by then we typically have only a limited selection of chicks. Visitors sometimes expect to find chicks in all of our 230 breeds available to take home that day. To avoid disappointment, we emphasize that the chick selection is extremely limited on Saturdays.

And that’s today’s news from the Cackle Coop!

Revised 12/5/2022