Cages is indeed a great solution.
Heads-up: Dont build 1 cage and use it as your quantum chick pile. Use a minimum of 3-4. Reason being its the cage generates the jobs, not the animals. So if you assign 40 chicks to 1 cage you get 1 dwarf who takes a month to wade about grabbing each little fuzzball. 3-4 cages results in 3-4 dwarves. At the fps you get right after a hatching this makes a big deal. (lol, they always hatch together, its a conspiracy by the avian population to eat your fps)
Anecdotal: I've seen a dwarf assigned to gather a big flock of chicks into a cage disturb nesting mothers and cause them to move off a nestbox. Possibly the targetted chick stepped onto it too bringing the dwarf into the tile.
11 fps is not really longterm viable unless you already got a lot of what you wanted done. When it slows up that much then digging stuff out takes forever, even with a bunch of legends. Takes a long real time for me to get an ingame year done too. Im taking steps by 25 and 20 is a point at which it becomes 'fix at all costs', 15 is dead.
I prefer it to farming and trading for leather. Once you get a routine of caging chicks until they mature then it feeds you, gives you your leather and leaves bone for decorating (yay, my favorite fix ever). That said buying leather bins is easy, its cheap as chips and trading for it is totally viable.