Baby it's cold outside

With temperatures dipping down into the twenties last week, it was mighty chilly in the mornings, trudging out to milk the old girls.  The water buckets I use to catch rainwater in all had a thick sheet of ice covering the top.  Although we got nowhere near as cold as it got up north, it was pretty cold for us and our animals, I'm sure.

Ice

I have all of our 100 baby chicks in brooders in the garage.  They are under heat lamps.  In order to fill their water containers, I had to bust the ice with a bucket to get down to the water.  Up in northern states they have heated water troughs that keep the water from freezing.

Frozen water trough

Since the chicks aren't yet a week old and don't have feathers, they must be protected from the elements, away from cold, drafty breezes.  I have 50 chicks in the big, old brooder below and 25 each in two smaller ones.  One thing you can notice in the picture below is that the 50 birds are all piled up.  They are clamoring to get underneath the heat lamp to get warm.  I lowered the level of the lamp, but they still piled up.  I learned that if you are going to put 50 birds in one brooder, you need two heat lamps to better distribute the heat.  I have another lamp, but didn't have an extra bulb.  I went to the hardware store to get another one, but they were sold out. It has since warmed up, but we ended up losing one baby chick from this brooder, presumably from being trampled upon in the pile.  So 99 chicks left to go...

A pile of Cornish Cross meat birds

Here are 25 chicks in one side of the other brooder.  You can see that the chicks aren't quite as piled up as the others.  The heat was more evenly distributed amongst the 25 and they were more comfortable.

25 chicks under the heat lamp

Here are the 25 chicks on the other side, nice and toasty.

We didn't lose but 1 chick in the cold weather, but we did have one more casualty. Our goldfish that lives in the cows' water trough didn't make it through the cold weather and was found floating on the surface. Fortunately it has warmed up and the weather is nice now, so all the animals are doing well.