Author: Anna & Mark

Some years, having
chicks pop out of their shells in the middle of March is perfect. 
Other years, like 2013, it’s pushing the envelope, especially if you
want to get
them out of the house by the time they’re a week old.



I wrote earlier about
how we
haven’t been able to get our first set of broilers out on pasture much
yet, but I’ve had to
baby them in other ways as well.  The most notable method is to
double the number of Ecoglow
Brooders I’ve made
available to our miniature flock.

The brooder you can
barely see in the back of the photo above has the legs as low as
possible, which means that when all of our two-week-old chicks snuggled
underneath, they raised the brooder up slightly but got full benefit of
its warmth.  Adding a second brooder in front, one notch higher,
forms a sort of porch that allows chicks who get pushed out to still
enjoy warmth.  The combo carried our chicks through a 15 degree
Fahrenheit night when they were only eleven to thirteen days old. 
(Isn’t it astonishing how the brooder’s temperature
limits change as the
chicks age?)

If I hadn’t had another
brooder on hand, I probably would have just bitten the bullet and
brought our mini-flock back inside for the cold night.  But we’d
had trouble with the power brick on our older brooder, had sent it in
for a (free) repair, and then purchased a second unit when it looked
like we wouldn’t get our first brooder back by hatch time.  Since
we had two brooders on hand, I figured we should use them. 
Granted, running two brooders doubles our power
consumption, but
still leaves us at only about 80% of what you’d use with a heat lamp.

And our chicks seem to
be weathering the cold temperatures just fine with the double brooders,
limited pasture time, and vents all the way closed.  They sure do
enjoy basking in the sun when it comes out, though.

I took the short video
above on Saturday afternoon, when we enjoyed a day of spring before
diving back into winter.

Usually, I let our
chicks out to nibble at the ground once they’re about two weeks old and
are well-bonded to their outdoor
brooder. 
Unfortunately, this year, the weather has been against me.  While
chicks are still covered in fluff, they’re easily chilled if they get
wet, so I can’t let them out into cold rains or snows, which is what
the weather’s been like for most of their second week of life.

So they’ve mostly been
stuck inside, except for this one foray into the wider world.  The
Pearl Leghorns led the charge once the door opened, but were also the
most confused by not being able to walk through the plexiglass to get
back home.  Hopefully, by this coming weekend, the worm of winter
will have turned and the Leghorns will be able to show their shyer
foster siblings how to hunt.