Waterers vs mud puddles

[Deleted]

Can someone tell me why I spend so much time cleaning out and filling the waterers just so the chickens can walk around them to drink out of a mud puddle?

[Mari-in-IN]

I know what you mean!
My first year of raising chickens I was trying so hard to do "everything by the book". I would not allow them to drink from filthy puddles and would go around to all of them covering/filling them with dirt, etc. I dreaded every time I saw heavy rain in the forecast.
Now-ummm-I'm a lot more relaxed!

[Deleted]

I always get a bit tickled when I read someone's advice about sterilizing the waterers and making sure the chickens don't eat certain things.  
Chickens will eat just about anything, and they don't care if it came from a bag or the dogs drug it up from the woods.  
They love to drink from mud puddles!  Like when you dump the nasty water out of a tub to carefully clean it and fill with fresh water, what are the chickens doing?  They are slurping up the nasty water that you poured out, because it might have something'good' in it.

Sometimes I wonder if we make them more susceptible to disease by being such clean freaks with them.

[bergere]

I always keep fresh water about, because they do drink out of it. But you are right... they have to check everything out and at least sample it. LOL

[wally]

Its the same reason you feed your dogs the best food you can get , then the dog chews on horse apples in the barn.

[Deleted]

My birdbrains will try to drink out of the stock tank, versus walking to their water fount 50 feet away. A few have fallen in and drowned. We lose a couple a year this way, and it would be more than that but sometimes we find them in time and get them out.

[aoconnor]

Mine get fresh water every other day, and have lots of access to other water sources. Their very favorite is when I overflow my stock tanks to clean the debris off the top, the birds all run to the overflow stream and drink and play in the water. Sigh...

[tenbusybees]

I quit messing with waterers a few years ago. Between the goose pools that get dumped and refilled 2-3x a day, the dogs' water buckets that get refilled just as often, plenty of puddles they have PLENTY of water. The waters just became too much hassle..especially when the geese LOVEDthe challange of a quick little bath the waterers provided. LOL!

[gracielagata]

I think it is too funny that my chickens love to drink out of the drips when I fill the waterers. All full of pine straw and dirt, of course. It does drive me batty though when they inadvertently throw straw and dirt into the waterers.... ugh. And I have no where to get them hung out of the way that the chickens wouldn't use to escape. The almost foot they are raised isn't cutting it with the pine straw bedding all over their chicken yard.

mocows- To prevent deaths in the trough, have you thought about putting cinder blocks in the troughs? I assume it work for chickens. I do it because our barn cats LOVE to play on the edges of the trough, and I am afraid they will fall in and drown during the winter due to cold. With the cinder block, they have now discovered a great source of water when we forget to fill their out of the way/out of sight bowl. Of course, the desire to play with the troughs might have been borne out of the fact that we used to have feeder goldfish in them.

[manygoatsnmore]

I had a problem losing chicks in November after a cold snap. The silly birds got used to jumping up on the frozen water in the trough and drinking around the thawed edges. Of course, when the thaw hit the next week, there were a few that couldn't figure out that the water wasn't hard anymore...glub, glub, glub!

[gracielagata]

Eeks! manygoatsandmore. I can see that being an issue. We had a friend that kept losing chickens to the trough. I think he said the kids were not keeping the bird waterers filled, so the chickens kept going swimming in the trough to try and get water but never could get back out. They lost a good bit that way.

I finally just gave up and hung my chicken waterers off the lean to on their coop. I hated doing it, as I feel like it will take up precious space needed during hot, sunny days or snow. But I also just realized in typing this that in the winter, I don't use waterers, I use black goat bowls, so they won't be in the way then! They have another little wind break lean to my husband made them that they use for sun blockage as well, so should be fine in the end. Anyhoo.

[manygoatsnmore]

Yeah, all my chickens had thawed water in shallow pans (refilled several times daily during the cold snap), but they preferred to hop up onto the horse trough and drink the bits of thawed water around the edge of the ice floe! They don't call chickens "bird brains" for nothin', lol! 

eta:  I should add, this was an unused trough - the horse was in the other pasture and had plenty of thawed water.  Don't want anyone think I was watering the chickens and neglecting my horse!

[gracielagata]

But of course they like the water from the harder to get source lol.
And no worries, I didn't think that at all. Our horses don't get a heater all winter anyhow... I check everyday to see their intake on non-heater use days, and make sure to bust it up regularly. Then plug it in on the colder days. Saves a bit of money that way. I thought about putting the milk jug of saltwater in there, but figured I don't need anything to entice cats to drown, plus with the cinder block in there, it can be tight already.
But, hey, progress- I saw my mare share the trough with BOTH geldings at once the other day. My daughter's poor gelding is older and newest in the herd, and bottom as well, so she isn't always the most nice to him.