Around 6:45 in the evening, the already languid pace of life on Kauai, where this journey started, slows to a complete standstill. You head to the lanai for a nip of rum and sunset appreciation, and peer over the railing. If you’re lucky, you may spot green sea turtles hauling themselves out of the surf for their moonlight snooze. Raise your gaze to the palm trees and you are likely to see and hear the raucous arrival of the mynas as they gregariously congregate between fronds high overhead. Look in the lower, bushier trees and there, about 15 feet above the ground, are Kauai’s feral hens settling in small groups on the bare branches, with one or two roosters on guard below.
This is how domestic chickens would shelter if they lived in a tropical climate with no tree-climbing predators. Alas, most of us do not live in a climate that remains moderately warm year-round, nor is our environment free of climbing marauders. Our mainland hens are mostly pleasingly plump egg layers and not lean flying machines capable of reaching the safety of high branches. We do know of at least one fellow who manages to maintain a population of smaller bantam breeds of chickens in his orchard in a milder part of Oregon, but it’s hardly what we think of as chicken keeping: he seldom finds any eggs and periodically experiences heavy losses to predation. For the rest of us who intend to keep our chickens alive for several years, the only alternative is some form of confinement.
When asked to picture a chicken coop, most folks imagine a small shack clad in weathered boards, perhaps surrounded by a large fenced pen over a patch of bare ground. To us, however, that describes two separate things: a coop and a run.
Coops are where your chickens come home to roost, to take shelter from predators and harsh weather, and to sleep. This is also where hens lay their eggs—if you are lucky and they don’t choose a hiding spot elsewhere in your yard. Coops should be sturdily constructed, with solid walls, a roof, and a base; insulated if needed; and with some form of ventilation. Urban coops range in size from a large kitchen appliance to a walk-in shed.
Runs are the fenced areas that surround the coop, where your chickens spend most of their waking hours eating, dust bathing, scratching around in the soil, and squabbling . . . er . . . socializing. They may be partially or completely roofed. Runs vary widely in size, from tiny rabbit-hutch–sized cages (sometimes integrated with a small coop), to entire backyards enclosed by a tall wood fence.
The true art of chicken keeping involves striking a balance between the benefits that protection provides and the difficulties that arise from keeping hens confined in close quarters for extended periods of time. Consider our first chickens, Rosy and Roxy, who lived the good life. Each morning, a human arrived to let them out of their coop and tend to their food and water before releasing them to roam their lush, fenced yard all day. Just after nightfall, a human was dispatched to secure them in their coop, safe from predators and out of the chilly night. Their days were filled with fresh air, plenty of exercise, and unlimited nutritious forage to supplement their main diet of quality feed. Whether hustling for worms as we dug in the veggie patch or lounging with us on the patio, our girls were charming garden companions. And they laid delicious eggs with perky, deep orange yolks that tasted like creamy sunshine. This simple approach seemed ideal, and we were bitten by the chicken-keeping bug, and bitten hard: we enthusiastically expanded the flock from two to eight birds in our first summer together as a married couple.
The trouble started quietly with the squishing of cold poop between barefoot toes, followed by the unpleasant discovery of a cache of rotten eggs the girls had hidden from us under a hedge. Then, alarmed by the wilting of a prized blueberry shrub, we parted the limp foliage to expose an unrepentant Rosy digging her muddy claws in the soft soil, shredding roots and snacking on bugs while expanding a moist hole where she cooled her belly on hot afternoons.
Soon our little pack of hooligans was uprooting whole plants, and when our lawn browned in the summer, several managed to get over the fence to munch our neighbor’s much greener lawn. Most depressing of all, we soon realized that much of the backyard and patio had become so peppered with droppings that we were avoiding it and spending more and more time on the chicken-free front side of the house.
The final blow to our free-range utopia came in the form of two deadly daytime attacks: the first was an inside job by a dog that we were dog-sitting that should have been avoided, and the second was an entirely unexpected assault by an off-leash hound that somehow got under or over the large wood fence that surrounded our yard.
Stubbornly resisting any suggestion of abandoning free ranging, we convinced ourselves that fencing half the yard for the hens and keeping the other half, including the patio, for ourselves would be a fine compromise. We recruited renowned store employee Pete (a genuine farmer!) and the hole digging, post setting, and fence tightening commenced immediately. All told, we installed more than 100 feet of fence and gates to enclose a spacious and protective run for our flock that comprised almost 2000 square feet. We somehow managed to stay within 300 percent of the original budget—and within a month of the estimated completion date!
Not wanting to block off half of the yard with an expensive and forbidding solid fence, we opted to use rolls of relatively inexpensive wire fencing stretched over a light wooden frame. Despite Pete’s considerable strength and knowledge of fencin’, the fence bulged and the tops sagged flaccidly wherever it spanned more than a few feet. On a farm, you could pass this off as rustic charm, but in urbane Portland, it just looked shoddy. Nevertheless, on the glorious day we installed the last of the gate latches and put the hens inside, we held a glass of Oregon pinot noir aloft for a hearty toast: “To protecting our remaining chickens and sitting on poop-free chairs, and to that ugly fence that will make it all possible.”
The winter after we installed the fence, new challenges emerged that would dog us into the summer: a spike in the local rat population, an uptick in the number of nights we forgot to close the coop door, and the loss of more plants within the enclosure from intensified digging and pecking. Worse yet, the sagging top of the fence made a perfect launching platform for our gals to reach the neighbor’s lush lawn, and their raids actually increased. It was clear that our neighbor’s patience was wearing thin, probably not helped by our acquisition of a hive full of bees that liked to drink from, and drown in, his hot tub.
Fencing provides safety, but it separates hens from the true sources of vitality in the garden beyond—as well as our companionship.
We purchased and installed a $300 automatic door for the coop to cover for our forgetfulness, but that did little to disguise the fact that there were deeper problems. Underlying the mounting malfunctions was a truth neither of us could yet admit: the physical separation created by the fence had weakened our connection with the flock, and with it went some of our enthusiasm. We still loved and enjoyed having our hens, but for much of the day they were simply out of sight and out of mind.
It was clear that we were visiting the girls less often, and with less handling they started to lose some of their tameness, further weakening our bond. After our first child was born, there were long stretches in that soggy and harsh winter that we visited the hens only when absolutely needed to refill a feeder or their muddy water fount. Our hens were in danger of becoming livestock rather than beloved egg-laying pets.
Had we not moved to a new home later that year, our flock may have faced an entirely different danger endemic to the long-term backyard chicken keeper. Chickens (and other animals) housed in small yards for many years may begin to exhibit otherwise unexplainable declines in productivity or suffer chronic disease problems capable of spanning generations of new hens. This is usually caused by long-lived and persistent disease-causing pathogens in their environment that have become entrenched, infecting and reinfecting hens as they are recovering. In a dark twist, some individual birds will respond to medication, giving the appearance of successful treatment, even as whole yards silently become contaminated with potentially antibiotic-resistant organisms that eventually make chicken keeping nearly impossible. If the situation is dire enough, the toxic environment will need to be abandoned. For one unfortunate friend of ours, the somber prescription was just such a clean slate: new chickens lodged in a fresh coop located as far as possible from the infected housing. He burned the old one.
In response to the danger of antibiotic resistance at both the farm and backyard levels, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration enacted the 2015 Veterinary Feed Directive (VFD), a move designed to transition the availability of penicillin and other antibiotics for food-producing animals from over the counter to by prescription only by 2017. As we became acquainted with its provisions and considered their impact on our customers, we began to think more deeply about organic methods of thwarting organisms that can cause diseases in chickens. We concluded that reducing pathogen loads and breaking the cycle of reinfection were the environmental keys.
While delivering feed to our customers, we began to compare the variety of coops and methods of chicken keeping we encountered, judging them both by their outward appearance and by their owners’ testimonies whenever possible. It became obvious to us that the healthiest, longest lived, and most productive chickens all had plenty of space to roam, either freely in large runs or confined in mobile coops. Like our wild friend Cluck, these hens had ample access to fresh forage and naturally dispersed much of their own waste before it could accumulate in concentrations conducive to disease.
Despite their many advantages for both chickens and their keepers, mobile coops have never been as popular as the familiar stationary coop-and-run setup, which the vast majority of home chicken keepers opt to use. So why doesn’t every chicken keeper use a mobile coop? Our personal chicken-keeping saga (continued on this page) provides the answer. Although practical lifestyle considerations and aesthetics often win out in urban and suburban settings, we urge you to allow your flocks to free range or use mobile coops. If this is simply not possible, some complementary strategies for feeding, probiotic supplementation, and poop management will go a long way toward tipping the balance away from disease and in favor of populations of beneficial microbes, improving the health of your hens from the outside in.
We are obliged to remind you to research local laws, homeowner’s association rules, and your rental contract (if you do not own your property) regarding chicken keeping before you decide to start or expand your flock. Most urban and suburban areas allow some number of chickens to reside within city limits but regulate the number of birds you can have, coop locations, and the level of care. However, some cities, like Portland, will issue you a permit to keep additional chickens after your yard and coop have passed an inspection and you can prove that you have met certain other requirements. Virtually all cities prohibit roosters because of noise, but you may be able to keep them as well for a short time before they reach maturity.
We know it’s hard to believe, but there are some American towns and cities where it is actually illegal to keep chickens. We would never (ahem!) want to imply that these laws are in any way elitist or misguided, so we’ll just say that we respectfully disagree. Our message to our oppressed brothers and sisters is this: Stay strong! The day is coming when your hens can come out of the closet and lay in the open air of freedom!
Chicken-discriminatory laws have been easily toppled by a handful of activists in such places as Athens, Georgia; Tampa, Florida; and New Haven, Connecticut. Having reviewed several of these cases, we can reveal the secrets to the pro-chicken activists’ success: 1) Chicken keepers fighting city hall makes for great human-interest news, and 2) if the law is really oppressive or old, so much the better as far as ease of having a new one drawn up is concerned. One example of a wacky law comes from New Hampshire, where state law once required that chicks be purchased in a minimum quantity of a dozen, effectively preventing potential chicken keepers from starting small flocks or sending folks on clandestine missions to the borders of Maine or Massachusetts to get their chick fix. The law was changed easily enough when a neighbor of a state representative simply asked him for help. Not only did he convince the legislature to make the change, but he got three chicks himself!
We cannot openly advocate going rogue, but keep in mind that chicken laws are typically enforced on a complaint-based basis. Happy neighbors and a discreet, well-tended coop will virtually guarantee that no one is going to come looking into your chicken operations. We’re not suggesting that you disguise your hens with bunny ears and whiskers or dye their eggs bright colors—it’s usually enough to keep your chicken coop clean and out of sight from the street to avoid having people ask questions. Do involve your neighbors in your love of chicken keeping by stressing the positives. Assure them that your chickens won’t smell bad and that you plan to keep only a few hens and no loud roosters. Ask if they have any other questions or concerns. If absolutely necessary, you can make limited promises of eggs—but be sure to let them know that having enough to go around may require you to get even more chickens!
Mixing chickens can be difficult, both among chicks of different ages in the brooder and when newly brooded young hens are moved into yards with an existing flock. Chicks of different ages can be mixed in a brooder if their ages are not more than about two weeks apart. After that, perhaps only very large brooders with lots of hiding places for younger chicks will work, but it’s better to set up a separate brooder and integrate them later using one or more approaches. Mixing different breeds of similar-age chicks is seldom a problem.
When chicks are ready to move outside, where established older hens await them, your juveniles will be bullied. The pecking order is a very real and natural thing (not just a human expression), and what we may see as brutality is a somewhat unavoidable process of deciding who’s in charge and how the rest of the order will shake out below that top hen on the totem pole. As difficult as it may be for you to watch, your role is to stay on the sidelines and observe the action, intervening only if you notice blood or a serious injury. There are a few things you can do to help out, however.
If you have a second coop, appropriate day pen, or even a large dog crate, set it up within a larger coop or outside the coop sharing a side of the coop. Put the new chicks in the second coop so the birds on both sides can become acquainted. We’re not huge fans of this approach, because it can be difficult to maintain the separate flocks, plus it simply delays the inevitable day when they will be combined. Nonetheless, this is the approach most commonly used and some folks swear by it.
Instead of separating (or after using the separated approach for a while), we’ve had good luck by providing lots of fresh hiding places along with the new birds. Added terrain such as a jumble of thick branches will slow the attack by established hens and give the new girls a place to take a break. Adding a few perches to the run will also help, providing high resting places away from attackers. Getting cornered is very dangerous for a young hen, and you must make adjustments within the coop and run as needed if hens often seem to be getting trapped in a particular spot.
Distractions and boredom busters are our big keys to integration. Try adding a whole bale or big flakes of fresh straw to the run, sprinkled with treats such as cracked corn, and toss some fresh weeds on top for a finishing touch. A large, compressed treat block is also compelling and should buy some time for the new gals to become a normal part of the scene.
It can be very effective to set up the new girls in a mobile pen or coop with one or two of the less aggressive older hens, or otherwise use the mobile unit to break up the established cliques so the social order is not so clear and enforceable.
Never add a single hen to a group. She will have no ally and will be more severely treated. If you must, try pairing a new hen with a docile hen in separate quarters for a while before reintroducing both after a few weeks.
These suggestions also apply when integrating older hens to an existing flock, whether mature adults or started adults (pullets). From a planning perspective, you will likely need a secondary coop or pen and a redundant set of feeding and watering gear for the newcomers for several days to weeks. Separating new hens also enables you to inspect them for health issues before they mix with your existing flock. This precaution is the best way to protect your flock from disease and parasites.
It’s not uncommon for us to get a frantic call from a person raising chicks who is concerned about a bully bird in the brooder. We gently ask whether there has been any injury to the menaced chick or if it’s just disturbing for the caller to watch. If there is no blood, we assure the caller that it is normal for one chick to dominate the others and suggest the addition of a few boredom busters (interesting foods, toys, or other stimulating attractions) to redirect her behavior. If she has seriously injured a brooder mate, we instruct the caller to tend to the wounded chick first and then move the perpetrator into her own quarters for a few days (she’ll need her own warmth, food, and so on). She can then be returned to the main brooder in a couple days to see if her attitude has improved.
If taking a time out doesn’t help pacify a bossy chick, you’ll need to take other measures. Larger chicks and adult chickens can be fitted with tiny chicken blinders, or peepers, devices that resemble spectacles and painlessly attach to the nostrils on the beak. They work by blocking part of a hen’s vision to prevent her from targeting a blow with her beak, while allowing enough vision to the sides to enable her to continue eating and drinking normally. If a chick is too small for peepers, you may consider a trick that our coworker Jeremy recommends: He suggests gently binding the aggressive chick’s legs together with string, a small bandage, or surgical tape (being careful not to bind them so tightly that the chick cannot walk). This works either because her attack is slowed or because she is embarrassed—we’re not quite sure which.
Chickens are intelligent and curious, and, like most other animals, your hens need an interactive environment that provides opportunities for stimulation. Zoos and other captive animal care facilities use the term “environmental enrichment” for the many methods they use to provide mental and physical activities and challenges for animals in their care. We call it “chicken play.”
You can offer your chickens boredom-busting play options in a variety of ways that can complement almost any style and setup. Free-ranging and mobile chickens usually get enough stimulation from foraging, but the more confined your hens, the greater their need for play. You can provide play opportunities regularly, or add them as needed to create diversions, such as when you are cleaning the coop or introducing new hens. The basic goal is to provide a stimulating and complex environment to prevent boredom and to encourage social participation and bonding.
Feeding chickens novel foods offers the most common—and useful—method of play. Chickens’ lives revolve around food, so they are inclined to participate enthusiastically. Try lengthening feeding times: Instead of tossing them diced apples for a treat, hang a whole one from a string. Or go the other way—cut that apple into tiny bits and scatter it over a large area. Hang a whole cabbage just above their heads, and your hens will spend hours pecking at it. Food can also be used to train chickens to participate in other types of play.
One of our favorite foods to encourage play is a compressed treat block. Available in several sizes and sold under various names, a treat block is a mixture of grains, seeds, and nuts glued together with molasses into a solid mass that stimulates repeated, persistent pecking. They are available in various sizes and are extremely compelling and attractive to hens (and lots of other animals). A treat block will instantly become the focus of hours of pecking, which is especially useful because the most dominant hens tend to get most involved eating and defending it, distracting them from harassing other members of the flock. Blocks are an excellent tool for creating a diversion when introducing new hens, as well as a quick fix for redirecting antisocial behavior long enough to break bad habits such as toe and feather pecking. It’s important to realize, however, that this is junk food: it is very high in energy and low in protein, so laying and other health aspects will be affected if hens eat it for more than a few days at a time. Blocks are also a favorite with rats and mice, so it’s practically required that you put them away at night.
Our chickens like to peck at the bright colors of a toy glockenspiel—and it keeps them entertained for hours.
Enrichment using light, sound, touch, and smell also seem to be entertaining and stimulating for chickens and vital for their well-being. For a challenging olfactory workout, try hiding favorite treats (preferably those with strong odors) in a place where your hens will need to sniff them out. For visual stimulation, place a shatter-proof mirror in the run or on the other side of a fence—your hens will be very curious about it and usually find it good fun to look at the new friends they see there, but watch for signs of territorial distress—they might peck at it and hurt themselves.
Adding a bale of straw to a chicken run is a perfect stimulator for touch. Hens use their clawed feet for essential scratching activity, while their beaks probe and sort the material. This is our hens’ very favorite activity—and the minimum amount of enrichment we’d recommend providing.
If your flock is prone to pecking, give them something they’re encouraged to peck. Hannah mounted a colorful metal toy glockenspiel on the side of the coop and is teaching the hens to use it by luring them with treats, like she trains our dog.
Make a nature playground with rocks, jumbled logs, and branches. Add ladders, overhead perches, and small platforms for climbing and sanctuary for smaller birds. Make or purchase a swing, or just string-up a branch with some rope.
Your hens will “dig it” if you give them sand or dirt piles. Pen your hens over the compost bin, or bring wagonloads of it to them to explore.
Puzzle feeders are a good example of cognitive enrichment. They provide mental stimulation for hens and lots of cheap entertainment for their human audience. Parrot owners have been working on this for longer than we have, so we recommend drawing inspiration from their websites and forums, where you can learn about how they challenge their highly intelligent pets with foraging blocks, climbing nets, and toy challenges. Be aware that chickens are often not as agile as other birds and may get stuck or otherwise be unable to use pet bird gear. It’s a good idea to allow them to play with these toys only when supervised until you are convinced of their safety.
It’s also possible to train your chickens with the same positive-reinforcement techniques popularly used with dogs. A simple example is training your hens to come running when you call them. Just say something like, “Heeerre chickeee, chickeee,” dribble a little cracked corn by your feet to the waiting hens, and repeat. After a few minutes, or at most a few days, your hens will learn to associate the sound of those words with the treat and will be trained to return with the fidelity of a Labrador retriever. Using the same basic technique, you can train your hens to perform a variety of more complex behaviors and even, in some cases, extinguish undesirable behaviors by consistently ignoring them while reinforcing the desired behavior with treats and sounds.
Chickens are social animals that naturally live in small groups with a hierarchy we call the pecking order. By keeping more than one hen, you are providing essential social enrichment, and, though we don’t suggest you invite other hens over for playdates (there would be aggression, plus this practically invites disease problems), it can be fun to spice things up by pairing hens with rabbits, for example; they are similar in size and are generally peaceful together, though we recommend that you supervise. Cats are also interested in hens and are perfectly safe around them (exceptions include smaller bantam breeds, youngsters that cats can overpower, and exceptionally aggressive hunting cats). It’s probably a good idea to leave other species of birds off the guest list whenever possible, for biosecurity reasons.
Our first coop and run seemed huge when we first erected them, but it took only a few months to realize they could not contain our burgeoning chicken fascination. We struggled to enlarge the area, but we knew that, ultimately, we’d have to start over in a new yard to scale up properly for our hens’ needs. To spare others this fate, we generally recommend that newbies build from the outset for twice the chicken housing capacity they anticipate.
For those faced with the daunting task of enlarging a coop, we say this: Don’t bother, because you are far better off adding a second coop and run—or, better yet, a mobile coop. A redundant setup of some sort will provide unique flexibility that one large coop will never match. Our auxiliary coops are invaluable as transitional stopovers for younger birds bound for the main flock, refuges for injured and bullied hens, and quarantine areas for new birds from other flocks.
The chicken-keeping arrangement we encounter most often consists of two or three hens housed in an improvised coop surrounded by a small fenced run. These hens commonly spend their entire lives within a small patch of backyard real estate, occasional garden sojourns notwithstanding. Most of the hens seem energetic and well cared for, but some appear to resent this tight confinement, passing their days languidly scratching at their half-clean litter, pecking disinterestedly at stale food, and sipping murky water from a dangling, rusty fount.
In time, this regular manner of keeping chickens in the city inevitably produces a range of difficulties, stressing the well-functioning setups and swamping the rest. We’ve seen many chicken keepers become disenchanted with their pursuit, unable to keep pace with the effort needed to battle an endless array of tiring chores and recurring problems. It can be hard to perceive, but what we are experiencing is not a series of unrelated problems, but the slow-motion disintegration of an oversimplified system.
Although we offer a somewhat radical prescription to improve this situation, much can be done to make progress on the most vexing issues with a few simple changes. Rather than list and attempt to solve every housing-related problem we routinely encounter, we offer broader solutions that aim to shore up the entire system and prevent problems before they start.
Our wild friend Cluck’s poop produces no particular hazards, because she spreads her waste over a large area. Some chicken keepers can emulate her environment by keeping hens in low densities and keeping them moving, but for those with less space and time, confinement is the only option. They must use litter to collect, absorb, dilute, and transport their hens’ poop.
This is an important issue, especially for those whose hens stay within small coops or yards. Realize that chickens are eating and pooping machines, with each hen producing 4 to 6 ounces of moist poop daily, and this waste exits directly into their environment. Naturally, there’s nothing fundamentally wrong about this, and these rich droppings are a marvelous source of fertility for the organic garden. But within the cramped environment of a coop and small run, droppings can accumulate quickly. If not addressed, they will begin to stink and attract flies almost immediately, and they may pose a serious health hazard. So, without further ado, we present to you the straight scoop about the poop in your coop.
Along with undigested bits of feed and waste products from normal metabolism, a hen’s poop contains harmful pathogens she’s trying to shed. In cramped spaces or with high population densities, waste can rapidly accumulate, forcing your hens into close contact with this material and increasing the likelihood that they will reingest (eat) it, thwarting the healing process. A main way we unknowingly expose our hens to this risk is by feeding and providing water to our hens within the coop, in the mistaken belief that hens require access to food and water while laying or after turning in for the night. Rest assured that keeping food and water elevated and sheltered outside the coop will keep it close at hand (beak?) and greatly reduce the risk of cross-contamination. Elevating the food and water is also a basic strategy to help avoid contaminating what your hen eats and drinks with fecal matter.
And that brings us to litter, an essential ingredient for civilized chicken keeping that is quite literally required by urban chicken keepers.
We sell mountains of wood shavings and straw each week, which rank a close second behind layer feed in total sales. Of course, there’s a very good reason for this: the function of litter is to absorb moisture and keep odors in check by neutralizing nitrogen before it becomes ammonia gas. We share our customers’ concerns about the sustainability of litter and hope to popularize viable alternatives such as hemp and coconut fiber. Whichever litter type you use, we encourage you to compost it to use as an amendment to your garden soil.
We usually advise chicken keepers just starting out to keep the litter management routine uncomplicated by using the deep litter method, which uses clean, dry, and pest-free litter material such as wood shavings. The technique is simplicity itself: Begin with a couple of inches of fresh shavings on the interior coop floor, and maintain it weekly by adding a few fresh handfuls of new material. Restart the process with fresh shavings when the litter on the coop floor becomes too deep or odors become noticeable.
This approach works well because the airspace within the shavings enables the litter to resist molds and mildews while absorbing moisture without becoming matted down. To avoid trouble, keep lower-performing litters, such as straw, leaves, and woodchips in the outdoor run, where moisture factors matter less and where the mites they can harbor will not have the same opportunities to infest your flock.
You can take it to the next level and boost the effectiveness of this or any litter management system with biochar, bentonite clay, and our homemade antimicrobial herbal oil spray. When used together, these will help you maintain a litter condition that’s unfavorable to microbial growth and toxic to pathogens. In addition, adding beneficial microorganisms, such as those used in bokashi composting, reduces odors and harmful ammonia gas while injecting trillions of good microbes that dominate your coop’s doo-doo dojo.
Mucking out the coop is sometimes avoided as a nasty chore, but we choose to focus instead on the results: a bounty of nutrients, microbes, and organic material to benefit the garden. To make your harvest easier, you can try several tools and coop modifications.
Muck rakes are aptly named, long-handled tools that feature plastic or metal tines angled to make scooping litter much easier. Use one to scoop moist litter, straw, chunky coir, or other material; or use it to sift through dry material as you would when cleaning a cat’s litter box. Wheeled muck buckets are also sold at feed and farm stores; they make transporting the poop to the compost pile much easier and cleaner.
If you are into harvesting chicken poop to use as garden fertilizer, or you just want to catch most of it where it accumulates the fastest, install a droppings pit, board, tray, or hammock beneath the roosts where your hens sleep, digest, and poop all night. Add a couple inches of litter inside to prevent sticking, and you can empty the container every day or every few days, depending on how many chickens you have and how tidy you are.
Consider adding a floor in the coop that can be lowered into a diagonal position so that the litter can tip directly out and into a cart or onto the ground. This feature would be easiest to add to a coop that you are building from scratch, but you could retrofit one onto an existing coop if you are handy.
Slide-out floors make cleaning easier if you have a small coop. In larger coops, the weight of the litter would be substantial. You’ll need plenty of clearance behind the coop to be able to slide out the long tray.
The two aspects of our flocks’ health and vitality most within our control are their diet and their environment. In our early days instructing chicken keepers, we presented diet and environment as two entirely distinct factors, but as we observed our flock over the years, we’ve come to realize that the two are invariably linked. Hens compulsively hunt through yards, coops, runs, and litter searching for food (even those fed a complete ration) and are constantly encountering their feces, and that of other animals, in the same places in which they are foraging. Considered from this perspective, our hens’ diet and environment ought to be viewed as a single set of environmental inputs that we need to manage in concert for optimal health and productivity.
Managing the environment amounts to managing our hens’ droppings using litter. In our experience, chicken keepers maintain the litter within their coops and runs in either a fluffy and dry (aerobic) condition with frequent cleanings, or in a more dense and moist (anaerobic) state that relies on regular but infrequent additions of litter to offset the accumulation of droppings. These methods both aim to stay ahead of pathogens and odors with additions of fresh litter, varying chiefly by frequency and intensity of cleanings. By our estimation, both methods seem to consume an equal amount of the chicken keeper’s time and effort in total, and both manage odors, but it’s unclear how they differ in effectiveness at producing a healthy environment.
Regardless of how often you clean your flock’s habitat, keep in mind that it is already teaming with microbes, including some that cause disease and others that play vital roles both internally and externally in maintaining chicken health. In simplistic terms, the conditions you create in your coop and run will either favor the good guys that foster health or tip the scales to the bad guys that cause disease and drain your flocks’ long-term vitality and productivity.
To stack the deck in favor of the desirable microbes, we spike our hens’ environment with regular additions of the beneficial microbes used in bokashi composting, such as EM—Effective Microorganisms, a proprietary blend of beneficial microorganisms. If you’re not familiar with the term, bokashi is a Japanese word that refers to an anaerobic fermentation technique that uses blends of complementary microbes to pickle (acidify) organic waste products. Its chief advantages over traditional composting are that it does not rely on huge piles of material to heat up and it works best in the worst, muckiest conditions.
We should be clear that if your coop litter is very airy, true fermentation will not be possible. Nonetheless, the diversity of microbes present in these probiotic blends will ensure that at least some of them will find conditions to their liking. Where good microbes thrive, undesirable microbes, and diseases and odors they cause, cannot.
It is possible to achieve something more akin to true bokashi results in the low-oxygen conditions of deep, moist, and infrequently changed litter. Start by “activating” a gallon of the microbial blend to awaken from dormancy by following the manufacturer’s directions. Blend it with 2 to 3 cubic feet of shavings (and/or coconut fiber) and pack it tightly in the floor of the coop. Replenish this weekly with a thinner, additional layer of the same material and pack it tightly. Your hens will fluff it up again, but you can pack it down from time to time.
We also use bokashi in our kitchen to capture the nutrient value of our food waste that’s unsuitable to feed directly to our hens. We collect and bokashi food scraps in a bucket in the kitchen, and then bury the fermented results in our garden after a few weeks. We love that bokashi produces neither odor nor the loss of nutrients that occurs with regular composting—it’s free fertility to turbocharge our garden and our hens. After a few weeks, the buried fermented material mellows and becomes incorporated within the soil. The contribution can be significant: last year our bokashi contributed an astounding 720 pounds of nutrient-rich material to our food, ornamental, and container gardens!
Some of our customers swear that a regularly sifted bed of sand is the poop management system of the future. One such devotee recently explained to us how she made the switch by clearing out the straw in her run and putting down a 5-inch layer of sand obtained from filled sand bags over an existing screen of ½-inch hardware cloth. Like a very large litter box, she sifts the poop from the sand a few times a week with a scooper designed to clean reptile cages. She insisted that it was far easier than other methods she’d tried and was delighted that it also eliminated the rodents that she said liked to hide in the straw. Other than scooping, maintenance consists of simply adding a few bags of sand from time to time to refresh it. After a year of managing her run litter this way, she reported that there was no odor problem and that the local health inspector gave her setup rave reviews.
Though her experience has been overwhelmingly positive, we’ve heard from a few other folks who have tried sand and experienced fly and odor problems, presumably caused by poop that’s been washed down beyond the reach of the scooper. For this reason, we advise anyone interested in this method to limit its use to dry, covered runs and remain diligent about keeping it cleaned.
Rodents are a big concern for chicken keepers living in urban and suburban environments. There is a definite negative and widespread perception that this hobby invariably leads to rodent infestations. Although it is true that careless practices can lead to rodent population spikes, by taking some simple precautions, you will dissuade them from visiting your run and coop. As always, prevention is the best policy.
Keep all feed in rodent-proof containers, which can be as simple as metal trash cans with tight-fitting lids. Keep the feed containers at a distance from your chickens, or keep them inside the house or garage.
Provide only as much feed as the chickens can eat in a day so that it does not accumulate and attract unwanted diners. Or, better yet, use a feeder that prevents rat access, such as a treadle feeder, which provides feed via a platform-operated treadle that is activated by the weight of a hen.
Water is another powerful rodent attractant, particularly in hot or dry weather. Use nipple-fount waterers instead of conventional double-walled founts or open bowls. Because hens can reach higher than rats and mice, suspend the waterer at the height of your chickens’ beaks, and position it so that the top of the waterer is inaccessible to rodents climbing adjacent walls.
We urge you not to attempt to poison rodents near your hens. It’s not very effective outdoors and can lead to accidental poisonings of your chickens, wildlife, and neighborhood pets. If you must, use a proper bait box and select the newer, more powerful baits. Paradoxically, these baits are considered safer because they require smaller doses to kill, whereas older types must first accumulate in the tissues of the target, potentially slowly poisoning predators such as owls, coyotes, pets, and other urban hunters that would have naturally put a dent in rodent populations.
Alternatively, instead of poisoning rodents, try other methods. A variety of drowning traps and other clever trapping instructions are available online if rodents are drawn to your yard. Many rodent repellents, from predator urine to ultrasonic noise generators, are marketed as safe alternatives to baits and traps, though we have yet to find one that works.
It’s been suggested that planting mint or other strongly scented herbs near the coop will send rodents and other vermin packing. Alas, we’ve also found this ineffective, perhaps because the mint needs more thyme (pun intended) to grow!
Our approach has always focused on keeping our hens as safe as possible by day and, more critically, at night. Like most cities in America, Portland is home to a murderers’ row of predators that emerge at dusk to prey on backyard hens and other small pets. The most notorious nocturnal consumer of chickens in our area is the ubiquitous raccoon. Fearless, dexterous, and strong, raccoons are masters of the silent night raid. Their most devious trick is reaching through small openings in wire fencing to snatch sleeping hens from their perches and pull them through the opening. If a hole is a bit larger, your hens may be visited by weasels or possums instead, with similarly grim results. Even if these guys cannot get in your coop, your hens may be attacked by digging coyotes, which brazenly cruise the late-night streets in many parts of the country looking for a backyard with tasty takeout. It’s our duty keep our hens off the menu, but we urge you to consider the futility of poisons and traps, which only add to the suffering. As with health, prevention is always the best policy.
Protection is the most important feature of any chicken enclosure: it should be strong enough to keep hens inside and keep most predators out. Exposed hens are subject to hazards at any time. Sleeping hens make for easy targets, but the dangers don’t end at dawn. By day, even active and robust hens may be lost to off-leash dogs, birds of prey, escape, and even theft. The safest enclosures possible are made from traditional wire fencing. A single layer of chicken wire can be chewed or ripped apart, but other livestock fencing material, such as hardware cloth, can be used to make very secure runs—though the heavier material can be expensive and difficult to work with.
Site your coop in the open. We’ve noticed that chicken coops located in open areas seem, paradoxically, to deter predators better than those tucked into or adjacent to trees or woodlands. We suspect that predators feel less secure approaching an exposed coop, preferring to remain concealed as long as possible before making their move. Even rats and mice are reluctant to cross open expanses to reach a coop, preferring to tunnel under if possible.
Cover enclosures on all sides and on top to discourage climbing and airborne attackers. You can use heavy-duty aviary nets to provide cover. These nets, similar to those used by zoos to keep birds in open-air enclosures, are easy to secure with wire to a frame. Heavy fishing nets are a viable, less-expensive option, and used nets in good repair work just fine. That said, because a determined raccoon or other varmint could chew through netting if given enough time, we suggest you take extra precautions, such as doubling the layers of net, pinning down the edges around the base of the pen, or adorning the netting with noisy bells. Be careful not to position anything near the edge of the net that may encourage hens to roost for the night; they could be snatched.
Extend the fencing 1 or 2 feet beyond the sides and onto the ground outside the run or pen area. Then peg it down to thwart diggers. This is usually enough to convince predators to seek easier meals. Some folks add fencing under their runs or dig their fence edges deeply into the ground. Although both methods can be effective at keeping out predators, they can be difficult to install, and fencing placed over the ground in the run can prevent the hens from foraging. Our “fence skirt” approach has proven just as effective and is much easier, especially for mobile runs.
Use an electric fence. Pasture farmers swear by reconfigurable electric net fences. This highly effective deterrent is more startling than shocking to wildlife, but it’s perfectly safe for hens, who learn quickly to stay away from it.
Pens surrounded by lightweight, easily reconfigured electric net fencing provide heavy-duty predator protection from the sides but not from the air.
One summer, we brought home about forty young hens from the store to alleviate overcrowding caused by our taking in a large, wayward shipment of chicks that wound up in Portland rather than their intended destination in North Carolina. They immediately filled one shed, and as they grew, it became apparent that we would need to construct another coop for them as soon as possible. With a 500 percent increase in our already-large chicken population came a proportional increase in available chicken food—a fact that did not go unnoticed by the local rats. Their population spiked in just a few weeks—a fact that did not go unnoticed by our neighbor.
In response, we immediately ordered two (mostly) rat-proof treadle feeders and accelerated the plan to move the hens back to the store. We also reached out to Jreed and His Mongrol Hoard (sic) of Rascally Rat Wranglers—a “terrierman” with a pack of trained ratting terriers—and made arrangements for a hunt at our home on their next visit to our area. By the time they arrived, the excess hens were gone, the treadle feeders had worked their magic, and (thankfully) there weren’t many rodents left to hunt. The dogs were fascinating to watch, nonetheless, as they sniffed, snorted, and energetically destroyed recently occupied tunnels in search of their quarry.
Jreed, who typically hires out his dogs only for large, working farms, sat down with us afterward and shared a few observations that will be of interest to the home chicken keeper. First and foremost, he wanted everyone to know that ratting terriers have been bred for this job for centuries and may develop behavior issues if kept primarily as pets—don’t run out and adopt one, thinking that they’ll solve your rodent problems. Conversely, not just any ratting terrier will make a good hunter—the effectiveness of a team like Jreed’s is the result of years of hard work and training.
We were not surprised by his suggestion that chicken keepers ought to focus on prevention, but we did raise our eyebrows when he mentioned that he had seen the worst infestations in coops and runs that were fortified by concrete blocks and lots of buried wire fencing. It seems that once defenses like these have been breached (and they inevitably are), the blocks and wire become a cozy fortress for the rats, protecting them from their natural predators and preventing deep cleanings that would disrupt them. He recommended skipping the fortifications altogether and, in addition to a regular maintenance approach, once or twice a year deeply digging and flipping the soil in and around the chicken run and coop to disrupt and expose any tunneling rodents.
After we moved, the chickens at our new home, now eight in number, had a spacious, prebuilt coop, a large enclosure, and were closer to the house. The setup was smaller than their former domain, and we no longer had a fenced yard for them to roam, but the new digs were nothing to snort at. For a time they enjoyed a spring and summer of renewed attention from the humans who frequently brought them weeds from the big vegetable garden and many other goodies from the kitchen. Their vitality was back, the eggs were again amazing, and the backyard nights were filled with barbecues and glasses of pinot noir once more. Best of all, our daughters (our youngest had since been born) had taken an interest in the hens as pets, and we were thrilled to watch them enjoying feeding and occasionally holding and stroking their favorites.
The good times came to an abrupt end as soggy winter weather returned once again. We unconsciously went back to our old habits, and interactions with our hens were again reduced to begrudging water fount cleanings, doling out morning feed, and half-hearted litter maintenance chores. There’s nothing wrong with lying low for part of the year like this, and it was actually sort of instructive regarding the minimal amount of effort required to keep chickens, but as the results came in, they didn’t look good.
The chickens were squawking and pacing discontentedly, feed costs were up because we weren’t supplementing with scraps or forage, the coop was getting poopy much faster than normal, we had developed a minor rat problem, and we tossed bale after bale of straw into the run only to see it disappear in a muddy quagmire. Our hens’ health also seemed to decline, evidenced by occasional bouts of watery, foul-smelling stools and the complete absence of the vitality we had formerly admired. And they laid no eggs. When the returning spring sun did little to rekindle our interest, we knew something had to change.
We ruminated on what we truly enjoyed about keeping chickens and what they needed from us to be healthy and to produce abundant, tasty eggs. We also forced ourselves to confront the chores we were avoiding, which opened our eyes to the ways predators and pests were taking advantage of our lazy ways. But mostly we thought about how to resolve chicken keeping with our busy lives—how might we simplify and have fun again?
A mobile chicken tractor surrounded by hardware cloth can help protect your hens and keep them moving, but the weight is a consideration.
Could we recapture the golden years simply by letting the flock roam our yard freely once again? The thought of a poopy patio and a few lost plants didn’t seem so bad, but the presence of a local pack of coyotes raised important concerns about our hens’ safety. And we had become accustomed to collecting our eggs fresh from the nest box, rather than hunting for them in the shrubs.
There was no going back to free ranging, but we could try dusting off another idea from our past. A few years earlier, in our desperation to keep our early flock from covering the patio with droppings, we had slapped together a simple A-frame chicken tractor—a portable coop—from plywood, hardware cloth, and treated 2-by-4 boards.
There is nothing new or revolutionary about raising chickens in outdoor, semiconfined, mobile coops. It’s a proven farming method that’s been around in one form or another for at least a hundred years. If you’ve eaten pasture-raised eggs or grass-fed chicken meat, you’ve probably benefited from this simple approach. It maximizes animal welfare and produces wholesome food with a superior nutritional profile. Not to be confused with the vast, climate-controlled buildings of so-called “cage-free” or even “free-range” systems (a modest welfare improvement over battery cages that offers nothing to the nutritional quality of eggs or meat), farmers who pasture-raise their birds move them around outside in sheltered pens, protected and fed, yet also free to scratch at the soil, eat bugs, and graze plants.
The idea was sound, but in practice, it was hard to use. As we tried to load the hens into the mobile coop, the more unruly girls ran from us, and although we could usually lure them in with some corn, it seemed like too much trouble. So the rebels were allowed to remain at large, while two or three of the tamer hens always got parked together in the tractor. Even when we succeeded in loading in all eight hens, the tiny coop’s cramped 8-by-4-foot dimensions would lead to terrible squabbling, and the hens would soon plaster the grass beneath it with droppings. We knew that building a larger mobile contraption might have done the trick, but the small one already weighed well over 100 pounds and was impossible for one person to lift (though it could be dragged). A bigger one would require an actual tractor to relocate! Eventually, the beastly thing was relegated to duty as a secondary coop for injured hens, new arrivals, and mothers brooding chicks—and was never moved again.
Miniature versions of chicken tractors can also work well in urban settings. They’re cheap and easy to build and capable of housing an urban flock of three hens in a small footprint, because their mobility makes their effective size practically unlimited. They are also fantastic for encouraging hens to focus that same destructive energy they unleashed on Hannah’s blueberry bushes to do useful work in the garden. Wheel a chicken tractor over a pile of leaves, a compost pile, or even a weedy garden bed, and you’ll quickly see why they call them tractors!
Looking back on our own experiences and those of others, we think the main problem is convenience. For a mobile coop to be practical, it must be easy to get hens in and out of it, large enough yet lightweight, and easy to maintain (cleaning our A-frame was not easy).
Hannah’s life-sized PVC scarecrow seems to deter chicken predators in our yard as well as garden raiders.
Day pens—temporary runs—combine the advantages of both confinement and free-range foraging. A day pen is adaptable to any environment; you can locate the enclosure where you want to allow your flock to graze by day, and then return your hens to the more secure coop at night. You can purchase a day pen enclosure or create your own in a variety of shapes and sizes to fit your hens, your garden, and your needs, often using readily available materials. If you garden in neat, rectangular, raised beds, for example, you could create enclosures to fit over the beds; add some hens and watch as they help you prep the soil for planting.
You can also repurpose an existing structure such as a cold frame, dog run, tent, portable carport, or greenhouse to provide a frame for a day pen, or build a frame from scratch using a variety of materials, such as willow branches, PVC pipes, or bamboo. Several large patches of bamboo on our property are threatening to take over the yard, and we feel no regrets about regularly clearcutting them; they provide lots of tall poles that are ideal to lash together and use as frames for temporary runs covered in heavy aviary netting.
We have experimented with large pens in our unfenced yard to enable our hens to range in the grassy area between our fruit trees without worrying about them fleeing, and in our vegetable garden, we’ve used smaller pens that are easily moved within the raised beds. In the spring, after the hens have thoroughly weeded and fertilized, we remove the bird netting covering and use the framework to support a massive tomato planting.
Whichever type of framework material and shape you choose, you’ll need to connect it all together. If you, like Hannah, learned all about knots and ropes while working on small boats in Penobscot Bay, by all means lash your pen frame together with rope via traditional nautical knots. When tied correctly, knotted connections stay tighter for longer, especially in windy conditions. For the rest of us, twisting heavy wire around the points where the poles cross is just fine.
Hannah was the first person in our family to discover the joys of working with PVC. We had been troubled by crows in our vegetable garden that were digging up seeds and eating our crops. Hannah decided to make a scarecrow and set to work in typical Hannah fashion. Not content making a regular scarecrow, she constructed a PVC skeleton with articulated arms and legs, fleshed out with thrift store clothing stuffed with straw, and mounted it all on a T-post. For a finishing touch, she stitched a rosy-cheeked, grinning face on a piece of burlap and stretched it over a foam ball. The girls loved it so much that they named it Hannah and insisted that she build another one, naturally named Robert. Not only does this life-sized garden inhabitant do a great job scaring the crows, we also suspect it is just the right size and shape to scare our local coyotes, and we’ve placed one near our coop to offer additional protection.
PVC is an extremely useful, affordable, and easy-to-work-with material for making many other helpful things, such as coops and day pens, cold frames, greenhouses, and a variety of accessories. We initially had some concerns about its sustainability and safety, but after researching and comparing it to other options, we were satisfied that most types of PVC are non-toxic and environmentally friendly when compared to other manmade materials. Bamboo is a natural alternative, and although it’s more expensive (unless you grow it) and harder to work with, you can use it as a substitute for PVC in many designs. Other alternatives include flexible wood branches, copper pipe, and galvanized pipe.
Racks full of long, white PVC pipe are a common sight at building supply centers and hardware stores. PVC pipes and fittings are used primarily for drinking water supply lines, but they’re also used in irrigation, sanitary, hydroponic, and gray water systems. The PVC NSF-61 grade is intended for carrying drinking water and will not leach toxins or pose other dangers under normal conditions; this type should be safe to use for delivering water throughout the garden and to your chickens.
Furniture-grade PVC, which is also non-toxic (and more expensive), is the best kind to use for building coop and pen structures. Several manufacturers produce PVC pipes and fittings in a range of colors and sizes for building furniture and other DIY projects. It’s also the best choice to resist the sun’s UV rays, which eventually will, to varying degrees, make all other grades of PVC brittle.
The modular nature of PVC unleashes creativity, and you can design portable (or stationary) housing in any shape or size, from flexible structures using small pipe of ½ to 1 inch, to much sturdier structures with 2-inch pipe. After selecting a framing material, you’ll need to select a 3D shape for your pen to fit your needs. Hundreds of plans are available online for cold frames, A-frames, domes, and teepees. Just keep in mind that it needs to be lightweight and easy to move around and/or deconstruct.
The easiest shape to construct is a teepee-shape wrapped in a heavy netting or fencing that extends beyond the base to discourage digging predators. Connect the bottoms of the poles to a frame on the ground to offer extra stability. Another easy form is a hoop house, like the bent-pole types used to cover gardens. We recommend adding one or more purlins (horizontal ridge poles) in addition to the frame at the bottom for rigidity and sheer strength. If you use star connectors, you can create geodesic domes, another efficient type of construction. In areas of heavy snow load or high winds, we recommend A-frame designs with steep sides made with thicker PVC. Lighter structures are potentially more vulnerable to weather extremes than traditional construction, and we recommend anchoring the structure in high wind and otherwise following the seasonal customs of protecting outdoor items your area.
At some point, you will need to bond your pipes and fittings together permanently to strengthen and complete your structure. We urge you to learn from our mistake and skip the traditional purple primer and colorful glues: these colors indicate to plumbing inspectors that plumbing has been properly installed, but for our use, they do little more than highlight every stain, streak, and drip. Look for specially made clear PVC primer and glue all-in-one. Not only will your PVC projects look much tidier, but this type of glue contains lower levels of volatile organic compounds (VOCs), making it safer and much less stinky than some other brands.
We also recommend using outdoor-rated spray paint to finish and protect your PVC designs. This will not only protect the PVC from damaging UV rays, but it gives you a fun opportunity to personalize your creation. Spray paint choices abound—from oil-rubbed bronze, to aged steel, copper, hammered metal, and more conventional colors in several sheens.
Tractor coops made of PVC pipes and tarps are commonly used on small farms, mostly for seasonal pasturing of meat birds. The basic structures are indeed lightweight, easy to assemble, adequately protective—and really, really ugly in your yard. We upgraded the design of the mobile coop that we now use, improving its aesthetics while incorporating the features needed for a backyard coop (plus a few extra). The result we’ve dubbed “lawn moa,” which combines its function with the Hawaiian word for chicken. Our lawn moa can also work as a cold frame to warm both chickens and soil in the spring. We cover it with plastic greenhouse panels, which act as insulation as well as allowing in light, but any heavyweight, clear plastic sheeting will get the job done. Keep in mind that plastic covers are no substitute for the security of an inner layer of fencing or heavy netting.
