Creating a Brooder Area

*This post was originally published in April 2014. It has been updated to provide better information and for your reading pleasure.

 

 

 

Hatching your own eggs can be fun and exciting. To wait anxiously by the incubator for 20 days is anticipation building but that final day, day 21, that is the pinnacle of thrilling. To watch those tiny, fragile chicks emerge from the shell is fascinating, but now that they are born and it’s time to come out of the incubator what do you do with them? You are going to need to have a brooding area set-up in advance. To help you prepare for your new arrivals I’m going to give you a walk through of our brooding area.

In our house we have a split master bathroom. One bathroom contains our shower but the other has a large garden tub which we have literally used one time in the last 4 years so we decided to put it to good use as a brooding area. The bottom of the tub is slick and even with litter in the bottom the littles could have problems with slipping which could cause spraddle leg. To combat this potential problem we lined the tub with some cheap, non-slip draw liner from the local dollar store. After that, we covered the entire floor with pine shavings.  If you choose to use shavings be forewarned that aromatic wood shavings such as cedar can cause respiratory problems in chickens and chicks who are especially susceptible.  (Please note that the dust bath area, grass, and roost were not added until later for reasons that will be addressed as we cover these items below). Depending on what you plan to use for a brooding area you too need to make sure that the floor is not slick. Spraddle leg can be fixed in most cases but it is best avoided whenever possible through good planning and preparation. 

 

 

The brooding area is a rather large area with and chicks need to have somewhere warm to retreat. This is where the “house” comes in. We used a cardboard box that is the same width as our brooder to minimize heat loss to the surrounding area and give the chicks a nice dark, snug area closed in on three sides to hide. We use a Brinsea EcoGlow Brooder (affiliate link) with no open bulbs to potentially cause a fire. Standard heat lamps are dangerous and cause fires regularly which cause property damage and cost people and animals their lives. It also uses much less electricity than a standard heat lamp making it a money saver in the long term. The brooder has three height adjustments allowing you to continue to raise the height as the chicks grow (or for larger birds such as ducks or turkeys), optimizing the chicks ability to keep warm. If you’ve ever seen a heat lamp or brooder that is to far away from the chicks, you’ll find that the chicks have to huddle together to keep warm.  This can often times result in the trampling and death of one or more of your chicks. We saw exactly that happen at a local feed store last year. There were two chicks that had been trampled to death in the crowding of a large number of chicks trying to keep warm in the large metal bins they were being kept in. The Brinsea brooder is a perfect solution as it gets the brooder close enough to the chicks to allow them to stay plenty warm without crowding each other.

Water is essential to chickens and chicks especially use a lot of it.  A surprising amount for their size in fact. We recently upgraded our waterer in the coop to a large PVC pipe waterer with nipples and so we wanted to start our littles out on nipple waterers.  What is a nipple waterer you ask?  And why would you want one?  Great questions.   Chicken waterers that utilize nipples make for cleaner waterers, less risk of transmission of diseases like coccidiosis, optimizes floor space as the waterer hangs up instead of sitting on the floor, and keeps litter from getting so wet. We love using our nipple waterers and training the chicks involved nothing more than placing it in the brooding area and tapping their beaks against the nipple once to show them that the water comes out there. We didn’t have to perform this task more than once with a single chick. The nipple waterer works great for our older chickens as well and was almost as easy to train the chickens to use as it was to train the chicks. Only a couple of the hens took a second lesson to catch on. To learn how to make your own, check out our DIY poultry nipple waterer.

 

To feed our littles we use a simple, red, plastic feeder that we purchased from our local feed store. We feed a non-medicated chick starter but deciding if you wish to medicate your chicks or not is a personal decision and both types of feed should be available at your local feed store. If you are feeding anything other than starter such as small pieces of grass or weeds (although we don’t recommend feeding treats to young chicks), then your chicks will need grit or dirt. Grit is an important part of the digestion process for chickens of all ages and is necessary to help grind up the feed in the crop. We did not start feeding anything other than starter to our chicks until after we had added our dirt bath area which provided the chicks with all the grit they needed without adding any purchased grit to their diet. There are other commercial options available for feeding your chicks and while practically any type of container that is small enough for the chicks to reach into or jump into will work, chicks will poop in their feed increasing waste and feed cost.

After our littles were a few days old and were exploring their little corner of the world voraciously, we took a 9 x 13 aluminum pan, added some sand, and gave them a small dust bath area.  It took them a couple of days of walking through it to figure out what it was for, but after they did, they took to it like champs!  As they got even older, we added some grass occasionally for them to eat and pick through.  They love it!

 

Adding some grass and sand to pick through is a great boredom buster which helps to ensure that your chicks don’t begin pecking one another. Chickens are omnivores and are attracted to blood so if a chicken is pecked and blood is drawn, the other chicks will begin picking on the injured chick and the chick can die if not removed from the group. Keeping the chicks together and entertained is much easier than trying to keep warm and care for an injured chick.

Depending on where you get your chick raising information, some folks will tell you that allowing chicks to roost can cause breastbone deformity. Others will tell you that it is perfectly ok. I am of the mind that nature knows best, so when our littles began roosting on the edge of the dust bath pan and the top of the brooder, I made this small roosting bar and left it to them to decide when it was a good idea to start perching on it.  I simply took two pieces of 2″ x 6″, drilled two holes in them with a hole saw, and then cut them off halfway through the drilled holes.  You could also simply use a jig saw or even a coping saw (if you want or need to do it by hand) to cut two semi-circles in the boards.  I then used a piece of tree limb I had lying around and cut off at an arbitrary length that I felt gave sufficient room for all the littles to roost at the same time.  (I chose a piece of limb because using something too smooth (like a dowel) can make it very hard for a chicken of any age to grasp it.  In nature, chickens would roost on tree branches so I went with tree branches.  I use tree branches in my coop as well).  If you decide to use a tree branch, make sure that there are no small, sharp points from branches (no matter how small) that could injure the chicks foot and cause bumble foot. I then drilled two pilot holes through the tree limb as to not split it when screwing through it, and screwed it into the 2″ x 6″ boards.  Making this small perching bar took about 10-15 minutes. I then sat it in the brooding area and left it to nature from there.  The littles ignored it at first but after about 12 hours of staring at it and avoiding it, they decided it would be entertaining to give it a try. They perch when they want to which is great practice for their later transition to the big coop outside.  

So, that’s it.  I hope you enjoyed the tour of our brooding area.  As always, feel free to ask questions.  We would love to hear your tips, thoughts on our brooding area, and to see your brooding area.  Have a great day and God bless!

 

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