How to teach chicks to drink

Several of our customers had told me that the Avian Aqua Miser works great even with day old chicks, so when our chicks arrived from the hatchery last week, I was curious to see how they would do.  We learned that teaching chicks to drink from a nipple-based chicken waterer is a bit different from teaching adults, though it is just as easy.

First of all, when you unpack your chicks from their shipping box, they're likely to be chilled and uninterested in anything except warming up.  We recommend giving them half an hour to get situated before introducing them to the chicken waterer.

Of course, you probably realized that your waterer needs to be hung much lower to the ground to be accessible to chicks compared to adult birds.  Leave just enough space so that a chick can walk underneath with the nipple at eye level.

Poke the nipple with your finger a few times, and the chicks will probably start drinking the water that drips on the floor of the brooder.  That gets their attention.  Next, try tapping the nipple just enough that water pools around the outside but doesn't drip off.  Soon, a chick will peck at that water and realize where the liquid is coming from.  Then it's only a matter of time until a chick pecks at the nipple hard enough to get it to release more water, and soon everybody's doing it.  Mark trained our chicks to drink in five minutes flat, then they went to town sucking down clean water to rehydrate from their long journey.