Mother Earth News has picked up another of my blog postings to carry on their site: Brooding Chicks in Winter. I must say that I admire their taste!

Everyone knows that the brooding period is by far the most critical time of a chicken's life. And it's important that they do more than stay alive -- they have to thrive, or they'll have problems later in life.

Imagine how heartbreaking it is to not only have baby chicks die during the brooding period, but for the survivors to do poorly later on. Or, even worse, for children to have this experience. I wrote my book, Success With Baby Chicks, so that imagining this heartbreak is as close as you'll ever get. What you'll experience is success, with frisky chickens living the happy chicken life and all the good feelings and enjoyment that this will bring.

I do this in a clear, easy-to-follow, unpadded 150-page book. Major publishers think that consumers want bulk, and pad out their books with filler, but I respect your time and stick to the point -- ensuring your success and enjoyment. Because you're sitting at your computer right now and reading my chicken-oriented blog, you know that the book is a good match for you -- and you want to read it before you get your first chicks of the season, so you'll be ready.

You want it on your reference shelf, too. I reread the book from time to time myself, since I sometimes forget the fine points and need to refresh my memory.

And then that faint feeling of dread that some people feel when they order baby chicks -- will they be all right? -- will be replaced with well-founded confidence. Or so my fan mail claims. So order your copy today -- it can't help you until you read it.

Fall brooding is at least as easy as spring brooding, and maybe easier. The weather is usually drier. The season is winding down, so there are fewer demands on your time. And there's plenty of time for the chickens to become fully feathered and completely winter-hardy before the nasty weather sets in.

Pullet chicks brooded in October will be in full lay by April.

Mostly, fall brooding is just like spring brooding. If you've been brooding all summer long, you'll need to drop your warm-weather habits and remember how you did things in early spring.

Some tips:

• Many hatcheries hatch year-round, but the off-season selection is smaller: mostly commercial strains. That's okay. Buy your high-producing hybrids in the fall, and your exotic breeds in the spring.
• When in doubt, buy from Privett Hatchery in Portales, NM. I buy all my chicks there. Mostly Red Sex-Links, but their Barred Rocks are very nice birds.
• Take a good look at your brooder before the chicks arrive. If you're using heat lamps, always use two or more, never just one. You can get heat lamps as small as 100W, or you can use floodlight bulbs instead of heat lamps, so you can use more bulbs without using more electricity. (I've stopped using 250w bulbs. Too hot. Two 125w heat lamps or 150w floodlights are better.)
• Remember to use a brooder guard this time, even if it was too hot in the summer.
• Beware of rats. Fall is a good time to replenish your bait stations (I like the big weatherproof Eaton Rat Fortress bait stations). Yes, I know poison isn't nice, but having rats eat your baby chicks is far worse.
• Have a plan for dealing with the chicks when they get big. Don't assume that you'll magically come up with a winter henhouse for a group of chicks once they outgrow the brooder house. Winter construction projects need advance planning. At a minimum, plan to keep the chicks in the brooder house, and allow two square feet per chick.
• If you need to bould a new henhouse for your new flock, read Fresh-Air Poultry Houses, the only book that gets the basics of chicken-house construction right.
• If the chicks are going to be confined most of the winter, buy a non-cannibalistic strain of chicken. Crowding tends to bring on outbreaks of cannibalism, while free range tends to cure them -- but range often isn't available in the winter unless you're in a mild or hot climate.
• Last but not least, buy a copy of my book, Success With Baby Chicks, which goes into all the considerations very thoroughly.

All of which makes a long and slightly intimidating list, but when you do things by the numbers, your fall brooding will go like clockwork. Try it and see!

We have one nice brooder house (the milk house next to our old dairy barn) and two horrible old ones that are supposed to be pasture houses, but were pressed into service more or less at random.

We're replacing the two horrible old houses with one big new one, building it on a pair of concrete slabs that have been here for decades (which, oddly, touch each other but are not at the same level.) Here are a couple of pictures of the brooder house under construction:

You can see the horrible old brooder houses in the background of the second picture.

Features of interest:

• We're using three courses of concrete blocks to make the house rat-proof and rot-proof, even with more than a foot of deep litter on the floor. This is essential. Not that we have a rat problem all the time, but even "once in a while" is way too often.
• We found a four-foot-wide exterior door, which makes it easier to get a wheelbarrow into the place.
• The three windows wouldn't provide anywhere near enough ventilation for a henhouse, but this is used solely as a brooder house, with the chicks removed to pasture houses once they no longer need heat. Smaller openings are adequate. (See Fresh-Air Poultry Houses for a complete treatment of this topic.
• A brooder house can be designed so it can be used later as a shed or studio or whatever kind of outbuilding strikes your fancy. In this case, the two-level floor would be a bit of a nuisance, but that could be fixed with more concrete.
• It's as close to our house as we can reasonably make it. It's good to be able to hear a commotion in the brooder house without going all the way out to the back forty.
• We'll be insulating the roof. This isn't strictly necessary in a well-ventilated brooder house, but is a nice touch.

[Here's a brooder house update, showing the house in a nearly-finished state and giving some more helpful hints.]

Here's another good old-time rule that most people have forgotten:

"The floor of the brooder must be warm and dry to the touch before you add chicks."

If the baby chicks get chilled as soon as you take them out of the shipping box, bad things happen. They lose the desire to eat and drink, and sometimes the ability to move, if they're chilled. Cold or damp litter is enough to chill them.

Usually you should turn on the brooder the day before the chicks arrive. This is no time to try to reduce energy consumption.

I've spent a good part of my life thinking about chicks -- by which, for the moment at least, I mean "baby chickens." It's just about the new year, which means that hatchery catalogs will start arriving in the mailbox any day now.

One thing I've been doing over the last few years is popularizing the insulated electric lamp brooder developed by the Ohio Experiment Station in the Forties. I have their paper on it here, and I devote two chapters to it in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. It's done us proud over the years and I routinely get fan mail about the design. Check it out. Your chicks will be warmer and you'll use less electricity, and the whole shebang only takes a couple of hours to knock together.

Another trick I'm fond of is using the little quart-jar waterers, but with narrow-mouth glass canning jars instead of the horrible plastic jars the feed store wants to sell you. Glass jars glint like water, and you can watch the baby chicks wander over and peck at the glass a couple of times before finding the actual water. Also, the plastic jars are hard to clean, and they're not clear enough to see when they've gone empty. Just buy the bases and leave the plastic jars alone.

I don't like bigger waterers (gallon waterers, say), because they have too much water area and day old chicks get soaked, then chilled. The quart-jar waterers are tiny enough that this pretty much doesn't happen.

If you're wondering about what kind of breed to buy, try one of the brown-egg commercial hybrids if you haven't already. Not only do they lay a lot more eggs, but they do this largely by laying in the off-season. If you've found yourself having to buy eggs at the store in the fall and winter, a handful of commercial layers should fix this. My personal favorite is the Red Sex-Link from Privett Hatchery in Portales, NM. They are just about as docile as Barred Rocks but lay a lot better.

Suppose you bought 100 pullets from the lowest-price hatchery you could find, and 100 pullets from an expensive hatchery. What do you think the results would be?

I don't know if anyone has tried this recently, but I found this very experiment in an old British poultry magazine. The results went like this:

The box from the expensive hatchery had more chicks in it (something like 106), and they were all alive. The chicks were energetic and did very well during the brooder period. The order was for pullets, and what was delivered were pullets.

The box from the cheap hatchery had no extra chicks in it. Some of the chicks were dead. The chicks were did less well during the brooder period. Many of the pullets were really cockerels.

(I wish I hadn't lost the reference to the article, because I'd like to quote it directly, but you get the idea.)

So what's up with that? The explanation goes like this: Suppose you're running a hatchery, but you're not very good at it, and you get complaints about quality. You need more money to put the kids through college. You have two choices:

• Clean up your act and produce a product that can compete with the best.
• Lower your prices to attract cheapskates. Cheapskates ignore quality and buy solely on price.

On the other hand, suppose you run the best hatchery anywhere, but profits are disappointing and you need more money to put the kids through college. Your choices are:

• Find more sources of efficiency so you can make enough money to live on without raising prices.
• Raise prices.

The difference between the options at the two hatcheries will eventually mean that the crummy hatcheries are all cheap and the good ones are all expensive.

Take-way: never buy from the low-price leader. It's not just that cheap chicks are more expensive in the long run, it's that it's so depressing to have them die on you. You should insure yourself against disappointment by buying quality chicks.

Actually, the best thing to do is to ask around and see where the most successful local poultry folks buy their baby chicks. If you're raising show birds, ask the show-bird raisers, since the commercial guys won't know, and vice versa.

I always buy from Privett Hatchery in Portales NM, since in my opinion they're the best hatchery in the West. I've tried 'em all, and their commercial-quality layers are very good. I use Phinney Hatchery in Walla Walla as my backup hatchery. I'm less familiar with hatcheries in other parts of the country, but I know that there are good ones and bad ones. Probably most of the well-known ones are good ones: Murray McMurray Hatchery, Ideal Hatchery, Stromberg's, Moyer's, Belt.

I go into this topic (plus many more) in my book, Success With Baby Chicks. If you don't have a copy, you should. I went through an enormous amount of source material and tried all sorts of different techniques before I wrote the book, all aimed at keeping your baby chicks happy and healthy, giving you that wonderful baby-chick experience that's what attracts us to poultrykeeping in the first place. I can guarantee that it will be worth purchasing, even if you're an experienced poultrykeeper. And that goes double for beginners, because there's a lot to learn, if you don't get good results with your first batch of chicks, the heartbreak of letting down the baby birds who are so dependent on you will likely leave you discouraged, and you might never try again.