Gettin' Ready For Meat Birds and Turkeys!

Yes, today I am getting ready for the big day tomorrow!

Tomorrow we are bringing home 25 day old turkeys, 60 day old meat birds and 10 day old Rhode Island Reds.  That's a total of 95 chicks in one day!  (Not counting the 24 I already have and the 30 Cochins I have coming next week!)  I'm secretly excited about it for now.  I'm sure the excitement will wear off fairly quickly once they get bigger, lose that cute fuzziness, the dander and smell gets to me.

Last week I built a nice Brooder Box.  It's 8 feet by 4 feet wide and the sides are about 2 feet high.  I divided off a section with a removable piece so I can have a smaller part for other chicks.  I lined the bottom in Vinyl to make for easy cleaning.  Then spread shavings on top of that for litter.

I use red heat lights, to help prevent the chicks from picking on each other.

I have hung a heat light about 18 inches up off the floor, for warmth.  The water is up on a pizza box out of the shavings, and I put the food on a piece of vynle flooring to help keep some of the shavings out of it (same reason I put the water up).  When the chicks are bigger I'll put the food up on something as well.

Here you can see the chicks that I hatched last week in the small section of the brooder.

I know that soon they will outgrow the lovely little brooder I built,  and I'm desperately hoping against all hope that the snow is gone by the time I want these out of the basement.  (Fat chance of that.  I think the snow plans on staying around for a while!)

Anyways, there you have it.  There's my brooder set up in my basement.  I also have a brooder box in my chicken house, and some grow out pens as well.  I'll have to get around to posting pictures of those.