Setting Up the Brooder: The First Three Weeks

Chicks are easy to keep alive and remarkably easy to kill, and almost everything that goes wrong goes wrong in the first week.

The losses are not mysterious. Three causes account for nearly all of them: wrong heat, a draught, and damp bedding. Every one of the three is a setup problem rather than a bad-luck problem, which means the work is done before the box arrives, not after.

Heat: read the chicks, not the gauge

The number everyone quotes is about 95°F under the heat source in week one, dropping roughly five degrees a week until they are feathered.

That number is a starting point and nothing more, because what matters is the temperature where the chicks actually are — which depends on the height of the lamp, the ambient temperature of the room, and how much heat the bedding absorbs. A thermometer taped to the wall of a brooder tells you about the wall.

So set the heat by the number, then correct it by watching:

• Huddled in a tight pile directly under the heat, loud insistent cheeping — too cold. Lower the lamp or raise the output.
• Pressed against the far walls, panting, wings held away from the body — too hot. Raise it.
• Spread across the whole space, some eating, some sleeping flat out, soft chirping — correct. Change nothing.

The other half of getting heat right is giving them somewhere to go. The brooder must have a cool end. A box heated uniformly gives a chick no way to regulate itself; a box with a warm corner and a cool corner lets it choose, which is far more reliable than any adjustment you make.

Draught and damp: the two quiet killers

A chick can handle cool. It cannot handle moving air, which strips heat off it faster than it can generate it. Solid walls to at least chick height, no gap at floor level, and nothing blowing across the box. This is the same principle as the winter coop, and it catches people out in the same way.

Damp bedding is the other one. Wet litter chills, and it is where most of the trouble that looks like illness begins. Waterers get tipped, scratched into, and stood in. Raise the waterer slightly on a block once they are a few days old, top up rather than flood, and change any patch of wet bedding the moment you see it rather than at the weekend.

The setup, before they arrive

Dip each chick’s beak in the water as you put it in. Most find it themselves; the one that doesn’t is the one you lose.

Space, and the mistake nobody expects

They grow faster than the box does. A brooder that is generous for day-old chicks is crowded by week three, and crowding brings pecking, which brings injury, which brings more pecking.

Plan for roughly half a square foot each in the first two weeks and double that by week four, and have the next arrangement ready before you need it. The transition out is easier if you have already decided where they are going.

The daily line

Thirty seconds, once a day, for six weeks:

Date · temperature at chick height · behaviour (huddled / spread / panting) · feed and water topped · anything odd · losses with a cause.

That last column is the one that pays. Two seasons of “day 3, one lost, pasty vent” or “week 2, chilled corner after the door blew open” turns brooding from a nervous fortnight into a routine you have already debugged. And the behaviour column is what teaches you to trust your eyes over the thermometer, because you will see in your own notes the day the gauge said 92 and the chicks said cold.

Hatch & Hover is ruled for this — hatch and brooder logs with the temperature, behaviour and loss columns already drawn, running through into the laying year. The free Flock & Hive Log covers the daily line if you want to start on one page.

Before the box arrives

Run the brooder a full day early and watch the thermometer at chick height, not at the wall. It is the one job that cannot be done after they arrive, and it is the one that prevents most of week one’s trouble.

Then dip the beaks, and check them more often than feels necessary for the first two days.

— Hadley