72 POULTRY FOR PROFIT 



A box like this accommodates twenty-five chicks, 

 no less and not many more. A smaller number can- 

 not keep each other warm, and a larger number — 

 more than forty, say — will crowd together and crush 

 each other. In warm weather and when kept in a 

 warm room these brooders are very successful, and 

 it is often possible to keep chicks a week in one of 

 the lamp brooders, and then transfer them to a fire- 

 less brooder where they have a better chance for 

 fresh air and exercise. 



The Lamp Brooder 



Indoor and outdoor lamp-heated brooders have 

 been very popular but are being discarded for the 

 fireless brooders on the one hand and the colony- 

 house brooders on the other. The objections to 

 lamp brooders are: 



1. Their small size. Most of them, though they 

 may be advertised as holding 100 chicks, are really 

 suitable for but fifty, and this, if several hundred 

 chicks are to be raised in a season, is too small a 

 number to brood at once. The more chicks you can 

 raise at one time, the easier is the work of hatching, 

 which is arduous enough at the best, and the easier 

 is it to care for the growing chicks. 



2. Lack of exercising space. The chicks do very 

 well for a week or two, but the exercising room is 

 of necessity too small to accommodate them long, 

 and a stairway up and down which they must pass 

 is a delusion and a snare. 



3. Difficulty in getting the chicks far enough 

 away from the heat. As the chicks grow they need 

 to be more and more in the cool, fresh air, and this 

 is not always easy to manage with a lamp brooder. 



Probably the lamp brooder which most nearly 

 meets the conditions of successful brooding is the 



