best way to water chickens in cages?

Last time I checked chickens were not rodents. Nix the rodent waterer idea. Not made for the job, expensive.

If you want to use a bottle there are small drinker troughs that attach to a pop bottle and stick through the cage so you can mount them outside the cage for your convenience.
http://www.twincitypoultrysupplies.com/store/images/popbottle.gif

You can put a nipple through a bottle cap and attach said bottle inside cage. . . somehow.

The little pop bottle trough and any cup drinker have the same problem. With only one or two birds drinking out of them there is not enough water moving through them to keep all the small debris stired up and on its way out of the cup. Also, with show birds the litter is usually very deep and with scratching the birds get a lot of litter into the cup.

There are nipple drinker brackets that attach a single nipple to cage wire but the range of cage wire it easily attaches to is not very wide.

You can make a nipple drinker pipe that may or may not be easy to adjust the height on, depends on your cage.

Truth is most of the individually penned show birds I see drink out of a cup that is manually filled.

i like the little hamster and gerbil waterers, for caged chickens.... i also use these for the chicks, and if you find one for the adults that is big, you could fit it with a 2 liter bottle, so you wouldn't have to change it as often, but these waterers are not messy..... I like them

of course you will need a rodent waterer bigger than the one shown, unless your using it for bantams, i use the one's for rabbits,,,, and (MY)!!!!! chickens seem the drink from it easier than from a nipple waterer

Why do you suppose that with all the wonderful attributes of hamster waterers the poultry industry has not adopted that type drinker for the billions of chickens that drink out of a chicken nipple.

Somewhere along the line do you suppose that all the animal behviorists, engineers, poultry scientist, vets, Tyson people, Perdue people and all the chicken farmers have missed something? Well maybe not. The three largest manufacturers of poultry nipples today have tried the "ball closure" type chicken nipple drinker and not a one of them have found a way to make a rodent drinker design work well for chickens.

Backyard poultry people may be satisfied with the way their chickens get water out of these drinkers but there is no way the commercial poultry industry would allow such an unsatisfactroy water delivery method. Thirsty chickens, water waste and wet litter are intolerable in the industry.

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OKAY YOU!!!! ARE COMPLETELY right,,,, i was totally Wrong Wrong Wrong for suggesting rodent waterers, because i know that i REALLY LOVE to order things from online, rather than running to Wal-mart or the Feed store and getting a fairly inexpensive rabbit waterer i am just trying to help someone with a problem, because i know instead of ordering stuff off of the computer i would much rather just quickly go to the store and get a large rodent waterer, i do KNOW that my chickens have no problems drinking from a rodent waterer... and i have not had any problems with the waterer dripping everywhere