BROODER thread! Post pics of your brooders!

[Blooie]

Yes, xpens are so useful! I use one for the dog, we used to have one for the indoor bunny and I got an extra one to make a auper large brooder last year. I lined it with moving boxes and covered it with chicken wire - perfect!
Now I am using two xpen panels (I pried upen the connectors - I will used zip ties when I need to reconnect them) as lid for my galvanized trough brooder - it folds so I can open just one side - so handy!

I also use an x-pen I had for my large dogs when I was showing them, way back in the day. Handiest thing! I've used it hung from the side of a building to grow tomatoes on, blocked off an area of the yard to protect it from my kids when we were digging up an old tree root and another time when we grass seeded a big bare area. I retired it from the show circuit in 1990 and I can't even tell you how many times one of us has said, "Let's grab the x-pen!" Now I have hardware cloth "sewn" with zip ties to the bottom 18 inches of it and it is my brooder out in the run.

To me and my flock, THIS.......






Beats THIS every time:

 

[dolfi]

Hi everyone. I was wondering, when are the ckicks okay to go into the coop? I have a separated area for them but am concerned about the draft. My chicks are about three months now.

 

[aart]

Hi everyone. I was wondering, when are the ckicks okay to go into the coop? I have a separated area for them but am concerned about the draft. My chicks are about three months now.

In FLA....3 months old...I'd have had them out there at least 4-6 weeks ago.

 

[SnowKnitty]

My 13 chicks are now 3 weeks old. They are enjoying the 3' x 6' brooder DH built for them but they need to go outside ASAP. (They will GO as soon as the rain lets up long enough for us to put up the chicken run on our mini-coop.) Meanwhile, I wanted to share my experience with the hemp litter I used in the brooder. It's very expensive stuff. However, I don't regret buying it. In 3 weeks with 13 chicks, I have not raked, scooped, or otherwise cleaned the brooder. Yet the only odor is the smell of the chick feed I have stored in the room. It's amazing. I compare this to my experience last year with just 3 chicks reared on a bed of pine shavings and the difference is immense.
When we used the pine shavings, I removed soiled litter as best I could but it still STANK!

I caught DH saying it could knock a buzzard off a bleep-wagon. It was bad.
This year, no stench and less dust. I am very pleased with the hemp litter!

 

[aart]

My 13 chicks are now 3 weeks old. They are enjoying the 3' x 6' brooder DH built for them but they need to go outside ASAP. (They will GO as soon as the rain lets up long enough for us to put up the chicken run on our mini-coop.) Meanwhile, I wanted to share my experience with the hemp litter I used in the brooder. It's very expensive stuff. However, I don't regret buying it. In 3 weeks with 13 chicks, I have not raked, scooped, or otherwise cleaned the brooder. Yet the only odor is the smell of the chick feed I have stored in the room. It's amazing. I compare this to my experience last year with just 3 chicks reared on a bed of pine shavings and the difference is immense.
When we used the pine shavings, I removed soiled litter as best I could but it still STANK!

I caught DH saying it could knock a buzzard off a bleep-wagon. It was bad.
This year, no stench and less dust. I am very pleased with the hemp litter!

Do you have a link to the product you bought?

 

[SnowKnitty]

I bought mine in 33 lb. bales from Hemp Solutions and had it shipped because there is not a distributor anywhere close to me. Another source for hemp by the bale is American Hemp. (Google each of those names, their sites will be the first in the listing, excepting any potential Google ads).
New Country Organics also sells it by the bale now and they price it at $20.50. You can also check pet stores. The stock is constantly changing on this stuff but I saw some pet stores - especially on the east coast - that were selling it in smaller quantities for use as rabbit/pet litter.

 

[TayCol]

Hi,
I'm posting to ask for advice on our brooder set up. We unfortunately lost our one and only BR Plymouth yesterday. It was about a week and a half old but was failing to thrive. We have a 3/4 Leghorn and a 3/4 Australorp who are thriving and i think they are about 2 weeks old. The Plymouth seemed a little wea and in morning i noticed it was resting a lot. It had a drink of water and did a poo and when i went back to check 30mins later it had passed away. I'm totally stumped as to what happened. Side note - we purchased and picked them up from a reputable breeder here in Perth, Australia.

We have been feeding them medicated chick crumble, i have put the Amprolium 200 into the water as directed and the heat lamp we got has been working perfectly.

Can anyone shed any light on what we may have done wrong? I really hope it was just a freak of nature and not something we did or didn't do

 

[Stephine]

Hi,
I'm posting to ask for advice on our brooder set up. We unfortunately lost our one and only BR Plymouth yesterday. It was about a week and a half old but was failing to thrive. We have a 3/4 Leghorn and a 3/4 Australorp who are thriving and i think they are about 2 weeks old. The Plymouth seemed a little wea and in morning i noticed it was resting a lot. It had a drink of water and did a poo and when i went back to check 30mins later it had passed away. I'm totally stumped as to what happened. Side note - we purchased and picked them up from a reputable breeder here in Perth, Australia.

We have been feeding them medicated chick crumble, i have put the Amprolium 200 into the water as directed and the heat lamp we got has been working perfectly.

Can anyone shed any light on what we may have done wrong? I really hope it was just a freak of nature and not something we did or didn't do

sometimes chicks are hatched with health issues and there is nothing you can do, so the death of a chick may or may not have anything to do with your set up. That said, I highly recommend for tou to move the heatlamp from the middle of the brooder to one end. Chicks suffer when their temperature is off for what they need even just a little bit, so the best way to handle this is to let them pick the spot that feels just right. When you have the lamp at one end the chicks can choose how warm they want to be. If they all stand under the light and peep they are cold and tou need to lower the light a bit. If they are all as far away from the lamp as they can get, lift it up a bit, until you see chicks running around happily all iver the brooder or sleeping close to the lamp.

 

[TayCol]

sometimes chicks are hatched with health issues and there is nothing you can do, so the death of a chick may or may not have anything to do with your set up. That said, I highly recommend for tou to move the heatlamp from the middle of the brooder to one end. Chicks suffer when their temperature is off for what they need even just a little bit, so the best way to handle this is to let them pick the spot that feels just right. When you have the lamp at one end the chicks can choose how warm they want to be. If they all stand under the light and peep they are cold and tou need to lower the light a bit. If they are all as far away from the lamp as they can get, lift it up a bit, until you see chicks running around happily all iver the brooder or sleeping close to the lamp.

The angle might not show the set up properly so I've posted one from above. The brooder is over a meter in length and over half a meter wide so they have a heap of room at one end that is cool and the heat lamp is pointed at the other end. There is only 2 of them in there and they spend most of their time during the day in the middle on the roosting pole and at night they're near the light but not under it. It's an 80W.

 

[Stephine]

Thanks for clarifying, it's a bit hard to see. I would still take the light to one end and point it straight down to just create a warm spot, not a whole warm brooder half.
Other areas to make mistakes are type of feed and age of feed (spoils within weeks), not feeding grit, dirty feeders and waterers, wrong bedding material. If all those are good, really that's all you can do. If you spot a chick that seems droopy you can give nutri drench (best) or Save-a-chick, or at least tiny pieces of raisins and make sure it has easy access to water and feed and isolate if need be - and then just hope for the best. I've had it work and I've had it not work, at different times.
And just a few weeks ago I had a healthy looking hen just fall over dead out of the blue. She was just under a year. Most likely she had egg yolk peritonitis - which has no cure - but I didn't do a necropsy, I just wanted to bury her since she was one of my two favorites out of all 15. These things can happen and it doesn't mean you have necessarily done anything wrong. Someone here at BYC said "where there's livestock there is deadstock." Caring for animals is tough!