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.