Before you commit to bringing chicks into your home, you need to think about housing and consider several basic questions: How much space will your adult chickens need? If you live in a cold climate, what kind of winter housing will you provide for them? And how much time and money are you willing to lay out to ensure that your hens have proper quarters? You should have these essentials worked out before you head down to the hatchery or place your online order.
By the time your chicks start resembling miniature chickens instead of those round balls of fluff you carried home from the feed store or post offce, you should set up their permanent outdoor housing. It can be humble or lavish, as long as it’s functional. The coop will be their safe haven—shelter from storms as well as claws and jaws. It’s the only home they’ll ever know, and you need to fully understand and respect that responsibility.
The number of chicks, your housing situation, and how much coin you want to turn over will all factor in. If you rent a brownstone in Memphis with a fenced backyard, you could get away with nothing fancier than a converted doghouse you scored off Freecycle. If you own a half acre of suburbia, you could buy building plans to perfectly suit your birds’ needs or order a prefab chicken spa complete with built-in nesting boxes and watering stations. Don’t limit your options—get creative!
How creative are we talking here? Plenty of small structures make for perfect chicken coops even if that wasn’t their original intention. I’ve seen old VW buses gutted and turned into chicken coops. I’ve seen theme coops based on outhouses, post offces, and summer cottages. (My all-time favorite had an old movie-house sign reading “now playing”—with the premoved—on the coop door.) I once used an old metal barrel and two apple crates with a shoddy tin roof to make a home for some Silkie bantams. It wasn’t as cool as the Volkswagen, but it did the job—and if the tenants had any aesthetic complaints, they kindly kept them to themselves.
If you’re comfortable around a circular saw and want to call out your inner artist, you can literally build a future for your girls. But even if you lack carpentry skills, don’t think you need to spend a grand on those 4%&%6 coops you see advertised in magazines. Chances are an old shed or a dog run—or even a used coop—is just waiting for you to purchase for cheap in your local paper, Pennysaver, or the Craigslist farm and garden pages. Borrow a friend’s pickup or rent a U-Haul for the day, and go get it.
This portable chicken coop allows you to move the chickens around the yard. See Buying Notes on page 125 for more information.
You also have the option to buy a new basic coop, and when you’re dealing with fewer than five birds, there are quite a few affordable options. My praiseworthy first coop, the Chik-n-Hutch, cost less than two hundred dollars (with shipping), and I assembled it with only a screwdriver in twenty minutes on my back deck. It made it through an Idaho winter and—covered with an old wool army blanket at night—sheltered my hens against coyotes, wind, and rain.
For those raising chickens in defiance of local ordinances, there is the stealth coop, which disguises the henhouse as a trash can. See Buying Notes on page 125 for more information.
Looking back, a coat of outdoor-furniture spray paint and some nailed-down metal roofing would have made it perfect. If you take such a route, consider doing some simple, cheap renovations before the chicks move in.
As backyard chickens grow in popularity, so do coop solutions. I’ve seen adaptations of garbage cans and compost turners. I’ve also seen futuristic space coops that look like those old iMacs. A multitude of options are compiled and cataloged in books and pamphlets. Or check out online sites like Backyardchickens.com. Poultry e-mail list serves, local fancier clubs, and homesteading communities are all available to you at the click of a mouse. These sites are thriving collections of chicken people dying to give you tips and inspiration to help you get started in what they’ve come to love.
An enterprising first-time chicken owner builds a coop of his own design in his garage.
Not to mention weasels, bobcats, fishers, owls, raccoons, and various stray dogs and cats. They’re all out there, crouching in the hedgerows smacking their lips and scanning for fresh chicken dinner. It’s your job as the guardian of the flock to keep your chickens safe so that they can produce for you and yours for years to come.
If you live in a city, you may think that means you won’t have to worry about predators—especially the larger ones, such as coyotes—harming your flock. But whether your backyard setup is urban, suburban, or rural, it will attract animals wanting to crib a meal from your egg factory. No hen is ever really off the radar, but that doesn’t mean keeping chickens is a synonym for homeland security. There are basic precautions you can take, and your optionsvary.
At a minimum, always lock up your flock at night. I don’t mean turn a literal key; rather, make sure predators can’t invade the place where your birds tuck their heads under their wings. Even in the most urban of areas, your girls still run the risk of becoming a meal, so your coop should have a latching door not easily flipped open and chicken wire over any windows or openings.
If your coop isn’t inside a fenced pen and doesn’t have a floor, make sure the base is secure from predators that dig, like foxes and dogs. You can attach a foot or two of chicken wire to the inside base of your henhouse and let it rest on the floor around the entire perimeter. It may discourage digging animals to meet a wall of wire just when they think they’re hitting pay dirt.
We all love the notion of our very own free-range backyard eggs, and so do your neighbor hood predators. A bird that can roam as it pleases in a safe, fenced yard is certainly a happy bird, but you might want to limit its free-ranging time to when you’re home. When an Idaho neighbor complained about my chickens walking onto his property I had to confine them, letting them range only in the evenings while I made dinner. Birds are less likely to stray too far from their home come sunset, and this way I could keep an eye on them from my kitchen window. Compromises can be reached.
Since my time in Idaho, my laying flock has been entirely free range. I currently live in a rural area where locals are used to swerving around the occasional goose or hen. During the day my birds have plenty of cover from aerial predators, and come nightfall they are locked up in their coop, protected from nocturnal beasties looking for a midnight snack. I have lost some birds to a fox, but for the bliss of my roaming birds, the occasional loss is one I’ll abide.
If the fox were to take a large quantity of my girls, however, I would certainly confine them to a fenced run for their own safety and my peace of mind. Confinement options include stationary pens, electric portable poultry fences, and mobile pens. Stationary pens, of course, keep your birds in one area, which they will deplete of grass and turn into a dust bowl in no time. Portable fences and mobile pens, on the other hand, let you move your birds daily onto fresh patches of grass, giving your lawn a nitrogen fix and your birds a fresh area to explore without staying long enough to ruin it.
If you don’t have time to move birds and want them to be foxproof, then a stationary pen is best. If you have a few minutes to move them across the yard, try the mobile unit!
A strong fence for your stationary pen can be a definite deterrent to predators and offers considerable protection. Even chicken wire several feet high will keep a lot of terrestrial predators away. But your fence may be useless against a burrowing fox unless you take special measures.
To make your girls’ quarters more secure against diggers, bury the protective fence or chicken wire about 12 inches deep and toe the fence outward about 6 inches. Even the larger predators generally won’t dig that deep under the fence to reach your flock, and the wire toed outward means any excavation attempts will merely result in running into wire. Of course, fences won’t stop avian predators like hawks and owls, so. . . .
Predators scare away other predators. Set up one of those inflatable garden owls to make any hovering hawks anxious. I’m not sure how long the local talons will buy the fake owl bit, but I’ve heard from many chicken owners that they’re better than a fence in some cases where foxes are rare but raptors are not. A set of blinking Christmas lights or a few pie tins on a string, clanging together in the wind, is another cheap and easy way to shoo nasty beasties. As a rule, most would-be raiders don’t like the idea of too much noise and activity at the scene of the crime. A bashing of tin and a light show may be more effective than the occasional rifle threat.
Roosters are great protectors of hens. See page 92 for the pros and cons of having a rooster in your flock.
It was Chicken Day. I was up at six o’clock and anxiously awaiting a phone call from my chicken mentor, Diana, who runs a small organic farm about 30 minutes away from my home. The call soon came: 105 chicks had been delivered to my rural post offce, waiting for pickup and their new homes.
Making my way through snowy roads, I pulled into the unplowed post offce parking lot, retrieved the crate of chickens, and loaded them into my station wagon. They were so loud! You just can’t know! Reaching Diana’s house, I pulled around back as instructed and honked. She came out, all smiles, and we hauled the crate inside.
The basement of Diana’s homestead is really more of a workshop. Seedlings under lights, tools and feed sacks, a prep room for slaughter and plucking, and all of it monitored by a fat gray cat named Agatha and a black setter cross named Angus. She set the crate on a workbench in the furnace room where her chicks would reside. I was ridiculously excited. I’d never watched anyone open a box of 105 baby anythings.
The lid came off and erupted in a cacophony of new-chick noise. I scanned for my five black chicks in the sea of yellow roasters and brown layers. My chickens were a Japanese breed called Silkie; they all have naturally black skin, bones, and muscle. I wanted ones with black feathers, too. Silkies are categorized as “bantams,” which means one-third smaller than a standard-size chicken. Finally I spotted them: the little Emilio Gonzalezes of the chick world.
After hatching, a chick can live for up to three days of the nutrients of its birth egg. Now, having survived two days without food or water, they were stressed, tired, and thirsty. Chick by chick, Diana and I dipped each beak into one of the chick fountains inside their wire and blanket home. Once the birds had been shown the way, they would settle in by their canteens and drink whatever they needed. With the birds all set to go, we heated up a water bottle, covered my babies up with a handkerchief, and I drove back to my farm.
It was the beginning of a new life for all of us.
SAFE AND HEALTHY CHICKEN HOUSING must be easy to clean and requires the following:
Adequate space
Proper temperature
Good ventilation (but no drafts)
Sun/wind protection (but plenty of light in the daytime)
Barriers against rodents, other birds, and predators
Adequate roosting space (see Roosting 101 on page 65)
Clean nests (see Nesting Box 101 on page 95)
Sanitary feed and water stations
Good drainage
Minimum Space
Chicks and chickens have different needs at different ages and under different conditions. Here are some general things to know:
Chicks younger than 1 week should not be outside.
As chickens grow they need more space (see chart below).
Chickens who live outdoors during the day need less indoor space per bird when they do come in to roost.
Chickens who are always confined need more space per bird.
In regions with strong winds, keep the coop less than 4 feet high and stake it well.
Proper Temperature
Until your chicks have feathers (at about 20 days old) they need a reliable source of external warmth, such as a heat lamp. Keep a thermometer at chick level in the brooder and for the first week maintain the temperature at approximately 90°F (32°C). Each week reduce the heat (by raising the lamp) by approximately 5°F (2.5– 3°C) until it reaches ambient temperature.
For adult chickens, the ideal temperature is 70–75°F (21–24°C). They will not thrive (and may su!er) in a temperature above 95°F (35°C).
This chart shows space needed by free-range or penned birds. In an urban or suburban backyard, however, you may need to keep your chickens in a cage. A height of 24” is adequate; add another 6” for roosts. For one bird, a cage should be at least 30” wide by 24” deep; for two birds, 27” by 32–; for four birds, 46” by 32”.
Chickens can easily succumb to respiratory ailments without adequate ventilation. To release warm air, provide small holes near the ceiling of the coop. Screens or hardware cloth will keep out wild birds, and a cover on the north side will block the winter wind.
Flooring
Several options exist for flooring, including:
Floorless. PROS: Least expensive; no need to change bedding; birds can peck at natural ground without fear of predators. CONS: You must move the coop every couple of days so that the manure doesn’t build up. TIP: Make sure there are no dips in the ground that could admit predators or a flow of water.
Solid floor (wood or concrete). PROS: Sturdiest option; offers best protection from predators. CONS: You must add bedding and change it regularly. TIP: If it’s a mobile coop, move it once a week to preserve the ground underneath.
Wire floor. PROS: Excellent drainage; protects against predators. CONS: You must clean the wire regularly and still move the coop once a week. TIP: Not suitable for heavy breeds because the wire harms their feet.
Bedding (a.k.a. Litter)
Chicks need bedding at least 4 inches deep; chickens, twice that.
Top choice of bedding is usually pine or other wood shavings. They are light, dry, absorbent, fragrant, the right size – but can be costly.
Excellent alternatives are chopped straw and well-dried, chemical-free lawn clippings.
Shredded paper (newsprint) is another good choice but must be replaced more frequently.
Hungry, curious chicks may start to eat wood shavings. Cover bedding with a layer of paper toweling for the first week to prevent this.
Recycling and Retrofitting
You can make a stationary coop out of a small wooden building such as a child’s playhouse or toolshed. And a camper shell can turn into an excellent portable structure.
