chicks in FL

[cmom]

When I had my chicks during the winter months, even here in Florida the nights can be chilly. I mostly used the 60 watt incandesant bulb and I clamped it over my brooder as mine has a clamp. I only used the heat lamp when frost or a freeze was forcasted, and I made a bracket that was over a foot from the top of the brooder for the heat lamp. The brooder was in the barn. This picture of a lamp is similar only w/o a clamp.

 

[Sunny Side Up]

Quote:
That's what I do with my chicks in Southeast Fla. Most of the year it's so warm during the day I can keep them in a bottomless cage on the grass. I put a piece of wood on top for shade & cover, and sometimes will put some on a few of the sides if it's really breezy. It's nice for the chicks to get dirt between their toezies, and it's great to have just that much less poop to clean out of the brooder box.

I do bring them in each night for many weeks, 6-8 or as long as I'm willing. I've lost chicks at night to corn snakes, even when they seem too big to be a temptation to them. Sadly, I've had chicks caught & squeezed and then swallowed up to their shoulders until the snake spits them out. Jerk! I get extra mad that they would kill a chick and then not eat it. Chicks are also vulnerable at night to predators reaching through the wire cage to grab at the chicks sleeping in their pig-piles in a corner of the cage.

During the day you must also protect your chicks from hawks. If they see or hear the chicks in the cage they will sometimes land on the ground right by the wire and can reach through with their beaks and kill/eat a chick. I guard against that by covering their cage with wood, or putting an extra perimeter of wire around it, or putting a bucket or box in the middle of the cage so they have somewhere to hide away from the wire.

At night I've used a desk lamp with a 60w bulb for heat and the chicks seem comfortable with that.

Chickens do well in Florida, they must feel a primordial tug to their jungle-bird roots here in our swamps.