The Chicken Coop (Part Two)

The dining hall was devised to stop our increasing rat problem.  We had rats getting in the run every night and eating any left over lay pellets, they were digging under the run and we would come out each day to find little round holes in the mud.  We put bricks over the holes as they popped up, hoping that they would run out of places to dig, this turned out to be a mistake as they just dug under the bricks too.  Shay once picked up a brick to move it to another part of the run and there was a rat under it looking up at her.  Not cool.

Instead of trying to rat proof the run Shay had the idea that it would be better to make an area that both kept the food nice and dry, was totally rat proof, and also gave them somewhere warm to hang out in the morning before Shay opens the run so they can go out and have a scratch around.

I made the dining hall out of wood from the dump again, I ended up buying a bundle of 10 garden stakes to finish it off towards the end because I ran out of wood and pickings were getting slim at the dump because of winter finally arriving.  I tried to keep it as light as possible so it was easy to move but it also had to be strong enough to last a few years.  I wanted the whole front to open so that we could scrape it out easily so rather than going for a single door that opened upwards as was the original plan, we went with double doors.  Every outside surface is either covered in plastic then chicken wire, or just chicken wire.  If the rats decide they can eat through wire I might have a problem, but right until that moment, this is indestructible.

Since adding the dining hall we have not had any rats.  We have had them replaced with sparrows.

Now instead of 2 or 3 rats stealing food every night we get 10 - 20 sparrows flying in to eat the food.  I picked one off with my air rifle a couple of days ago and when it fell down into the chicken run they instantly pecked it to death, was most gruesome.

I am not sure what to do about the sparrows yet.

We have also added an outside fenced area that can be moved around.   This new garden bar has been quite handy as its easy to move and we can move it very quickly.  There are essentially 3 areas for the birds now.

• The Suite and dining hall area.
• The run
• The outside garden bar

We can close them in to any of these areas, we usually leave them in the run and close off the garden bar if we go out.

So this is where we are at now, I am sure there will be more modifications to go as when summer rolls around it will introduce a whole new set of issues.  I am hoping once we have had the chooks for a year or so I will have most of the major problems ironed out.

Here is a video of me explaining everything.

Cheers.

The Circle of Life Bucket.

The circle of life bucket was picked up from a video we saw on YouTube, the guy had a bucket with holes all over it to let flies in and maggots out.  He had put dead rats inside it that he had caught, then hung the bucket off the ground so that the maggots would drop to the ground and the chooks could eat them.  Shay named it the circle of life bucket because we were having major issues with rats once the run had been moved to the grassy paddock.  We devised several traps to try and catch the little pricks but they were smarter than us.  I believe the final count was 8 rats and 5 mice by the time we gave up and made the dining hall for the chooks.  So the circle of life is: the rats eat the chook food, the maggots eat the rats, the chooks eat the maggots, then we eat the eggs.

We have put the bucket on top of the run where the wire is so that the maggots fall down when they crawl out, this way the chooks can just nip them up off the ground.  I have added holes since the original shown above as the maggots were not dropping out very well.

Since installing the new dining hall we have not seen any rats near the chooks, they still visit the compost bin though so that is next on my list.

The Chicken Coop (Part One)

 I know she doesn't look like much, but she's got  it where it counts, kid.

I had several criteria that the chicken coop needed to meet so the design really evolved from that.

• It had to use wood that was mostly under 1200mm long.  We were getting all our timber from the firewood pile at the dump so the pickings were OK but only under a certain length as it was mostly offcuts and demolished buildings there.  
• It had to be portable.  We needed to be able to fit all the bits on our trailer to move it when we eventually have to leave here, it also needed to be movable around the yard outside so that we could give the hens fresh grass to nibble and keep them a bit cleaner.
• It had to be easy to maintain.  The whole thing was designed around ease of cleaning as nobody wants to spend longer than they have to scooping up chicken poo.
• It had to be modular and configurable.  We are not sure where we will go next and what we might have to do there so the coop might need to be smaller or go around a corner, I wanted to be ready for that contingency. 

The end result is a bit of a mixed bag in my opinion, I have a few more ideas that I am going to be adding to it soon that will help though.  I have some pictures and a video of me walking you through the whole idea.

All the wood we got from the dump had to be checked for nails and have them removed, I would guess half the usable wood had nails in it and I am very careful not to get nails near my woodworking power tools.  This is just a sample of some of the wood we had to work with.

I started out by making a framework, I wanted it to be wide enough to hold 6 birds on the roost,   I made 3 nesting boxes as I had no idea how many I would need for 6 birds, turned out that just one would have been fine but this is how it started.

The piece of plywood in the front there was cut in half, the other half went on this side of it for the door as you will see later.  I don't have a lot of pictures of the rest of the build as I wasn't planning on documenting it in pictures, I usually work better with video.

Originally the idea was to have mesh in the floor for the birds to walk around on so that their mess would all fall through onto the ground, It didn't work out very well as the birds couldn't work out what to do and got all panicky.  I think it was because they didn't feel safe walking around on it, it was not very solid feeling.  I made a removable floor  but then replaced it with a trapdoor.

In the back of the coop there are 2 rails that serve the dual purpose of being something good to life the coop with and they are also the rails that the nesting boxes slide out on.  Originally I was going to have it so that we had to slide it out to check the nesting boxes but that doesn't work out so well with nosey little hens poking around so I made a hinge for the lid above the nesting boxes that you can see in the video I will post later but not in this picture as it was a later modification.

You can also see in the picture above how the water catchment system works.  It has worked very well all winter, I suspect summer will be a little different though.    You can also see in this picture how the door was just a piece of plywood that I cut and put hinges on, it wasn't quite long enough to cover the side and I have some other wood now that I might use to finish it off properly.  We still have a few litres of paint left, it was all free paint from the dump, they have a paint recycling area there that is just great and free paint is just the right price when you have no budget.

The run was made in squares for a variety of reasons, it needed to be configurable, it needed to be easy to replace parts and made to a standard size so that I all parts were interchangeable.  I ended up getting mostly 100mmx200mm wood so to make it go further I split it all down the middle.  This gave me nice strong wood and heaps of it, I decided that 5 cubes worth of run would be a good start and we could always add to it later.  The cubes are not quite 1m squared, they are just slightly wider than a roll of chicken wire so that I only had to cut the roll off in squares and there was no stretching or adding bits.  

This only left me with the problem of fastening them together.  I made up some model bits from scrap wood and tried a few different ideas but eventually I came up with the nails and holes idea, every piece has 2 nails in the top and bottom, one each side and on the sides it has holes for the nails to go in.  I used 120mm jolt head nails which seemed to work really well, they were hard to bend and just the right length to go right through the wood 

You can see the nail and hole on this corner.  This allows me to make this kind of configuration easily, you can see the nails sticking out on each second top square. they alternate directions and lock together really well.  The door was an old cupboard door we found on the woodpile, Shay wanted to be able to feed the hens for some reason so I had to make her a door.  As it turned out we made them a dining hall at a later stage due to a rat problem we had not anticipated.

This was the stage when we got our first chooks.  We started with 5 and they seemed pretty happy with the place.

Here is a video of just before we got the chooks, the roof hadn't been trimmed or nailed on, most of the squares were not done and the floor had not been replaced but you get the idea.

Cheers.