Outgrowing your brooder

[St_Gall]

Does anyone have pictures of your brooder setups for older chicks? Our chicks are two weeks old, and we're thinking about starting more in the incubator. Our older cohort will size out of the current brooder by then anyway, but I'm not finding many examples of bigger chicks in brooders. Any advice on having more than one cohort is welcome as well!

 

[akf93]

We are new to birds this year but we’ve had a few setups and this was by far our favorite. We had 18 chicks in this batch and we just kept adding on until they were feathered and ready for the coop/run/being introduced to the older birds. I’d just cut a hole on the two sides and the top of each box and push the wall down into one of the boxes to keep them a bit secure. A little tape and some empty feed bags over the bottom. Very customizable! And you don’t have to store it long term. We will be doing this again for future chicks!

 

[neo71665]

At about that age I have a roll of 1/2 x 1 inch rabbit wire that I fence off part of my run temporarily and put them in that with their own feeder and waterer. Depending on how many I have is how big I make it. Let them grow in that until time to turn them loose. Makes the flock accept them easier IMHO.

 

[akf93]

We are new to birds this year but we’ve had a few setups and this was by far our favorite. We had 18 chicks in this batch and we just kept adding on until they were feathered and ready for the coop/run/being introduced to the older birds. I’d just cut a hole on the two sides and the top of each box and push the wall down into one of the boxes to keep them a bit secure. A little tape and some empty feed bags over the bottom. Very customizable! And you don’t have to store it long term. We will be doing this again for future chicks!

Once they outgrew this, we staked up a temporary run outside the coop/sharing a wall with the run for the older birds. Our access door opens up into this run to make transfers easy. They go into the coop after dark when the big chicks are tucked in and we let them into their run before letting the big birds out. We will let them free range with the rest of the flock later this week. It’s worked really well!