Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Chicks Coop ideas

Eggcellent!

Slumlord had 1 mean bytch hen in his Coop couple years ago.
Going all cannibalistic on his other birds.
Rest of his birds walking around their azz,s all tore the fugg and no tail feathers at all.
1/3 nekked on the rear end basically.
Never seen anything like it.
Extreme pecking order schitt.

Cooper and Magnus.
Play great white doggy shark breaching for a seal games for a egg tossed up in the air for em.

LOL!!!

Red Stars will follow you around like a pack of puppies and are excellent layers. Cochins are the sweetest hens that are good mothers and layers. Just not so good in hot/wet/muddy climates due to their feathered hocks and feet. Bardies can be bitches to each other, Welsummers and Wyandotte's too. Orpingtons are a nice dual purpose bird. Americanas lay pretty green eggs for your ham but they tend to be a smaller bird with smaller eggs.

When possible, a 'good' roo' is invaluable for keeping the girls from hair pulling disputes and vigilance against daytime raptors and 'yotes if free ranging your birds. Need at least 8 hens/roo' or he'll be hard on them. Takes a year or so to really settle one in but serial rapists and azzholes become soup rather quickly. We handle our roo' every day and established our dominance over him early on so we've never had one be aggressive to us but have watched one open a big can of whoop-ass on a hawk that nailed one of 'his' girls.

Neighborhood mutts will wipe you out if you don't provide protection.. or shoot the dogs after fair warning.

You'll need about a foot of roost bar/bird. Place the roost bars higher than, and away from, the nesting baskets or they'll roost above/on/in them and make a mess. Stagger bars at least 18" horizontally apart for more than one roost bar. If left to range, they'll generally clock around their coop for no more than 100 paces. If you don't let them range, make sure you can rotate their pen fencing in quadrants around the coop or they'll turn what you provide into a lunar landscape in short order. Premier1 has some excellent poultry fencing options and energizers that will bite hard. 1 Joule will cover most needs with a serious jolt. Ours is run off a 12V car battery with a solar panel charger so it goes anywhere on the acreage. Pretty funny alarm when a 'yote's wet nose contacts same at 3am near your bedroom windows....

Made an 8x8x2' high feed tractor with 1" PVC pipe and Circo fittings covered with chicken wire and profiled PVC siding/roofing. Slip-T fittings for the doors to provide easy access to place feed trays and is easily moved around. Also gives them a secure place to shelter on rainy days. Just stake it down so it doesn't become a tumbleweed.

After a number of trials and errors, we've long used Modesto Mills Organic Corn & Soy Free Layer pellets so the birds don't cherry pick the ration. They get just enough for breakfast and some for dinner, letting them range for their chow all day in between. A lot of commercial feed uses rape seed (canola) oil and GMO corn/soy among other crap you'll need a chemistry PhD to savvy so we don't want it in our eggs or our customer's either.

If one keeps the initial infrastructure costs down, they will generally pay for themselves in a reasonable time and provide lots of free entertainment on the Chicken Channel....

This is the coop I built for chickens. Three feet off ground. 8'Wx12'Lx8'H

I put the nest boxes on the outside so eggs are collected without entering coop.

We let the chickens free range out of the fence during the day then lock the fence at night.

great info. Have any pics of your coops?

very nice

Just for you, Mr Skot;

Thanks guys, this will be a project for sure.

Lowes sells, in my area anyway, an engineered wood siding material designed for playhouses, chicken coups, storage buildings etc. and it is cheap and is easy to work with. It has a hard durable exterior coating that provides a primed surface to paint.

I just used these on some deer blinds I built.

https://www.lowes.com/pd/LP-LP-Multi-Use-Panel-Application-As-4-ft-x-8-ft/1002550422

Here’s mine

Ok I'm following this one. I want to build a chicken tractor. I realize eggs will cost eleventeen dollars a dozen. But I just want to.

Safeway is my coop ....I can get a whole lot good eats...without the chic babysitting....

Yup. I just don't use 'bucket or other photo hosting service and the file upload limitations here render them postage stamp size. Drop me a pm with your e-mail addy and I'll send you a few that you can post here if others would like to see some options....

Mind mentioning on here which pasture fence and energizer you're using?

Yotes got a hen last year while they were out and about. I'd like to get the e fence thing but there are a whole lot of options out there.

thanks in advance.

Oh, mine get the Modesto organic pellets too. And a handful of their organic scratch in before they head in for the night.

For those interested, a Behren's 10 gal galvanized can and lid will fit a 50lb bag of pellets or scratch perfectly. Our feed is kept in the woodshed, which is not entirely critter proof. Rat traps are in use and catch a few every year, there's a skunk in the neighborhood and if the little cottontail that gets in there on occasion is an example the skunk could probably get in there too. But, with the lid down tight on them, I've never had a problem. If you've got raccoons in the area that might get to them, the bail handled will come up around and lock the lid too.

Have a pard that raises the X's without any any of the typical problems they exhibit. What he's found is that most commercial poultry feeds are roughly 16% protein. That's not enough to support their rapid growth rate with the inherent problems of not being able to stand/walk, heart failure, etc. He's gone to a 28% protein game bird ration and has not lost a bird to their common maladies. Out of curiosity, he's gone a couple months past the usual 8-10 week slaughter time frame and had roo's get to turkey-sized 17#. He keeps them in light weight PVC pipe-framed tractors that his boys move every day to give the birds lots of fresh grass/bugs. Also, he doesn't overload each tractor with too many birds so they have room to move and feed. Happy birds = healthy birds....

Interesting about that high protein feed.

The four I had just got so big their breasts dragged and they had a hard time standing up. At least they were able to get up the 18" board into the coop at night.

As mentioned in my initial post, Premier1 has been our source for PoultyNet mesh fencing and a 1 joule IntelliShock energizer has been the jolt for our 164' mesh fence around the coop. Check them out for 120V plug in models or those that can be assembled or a 12V system with a solar panel/frame/battery box and can be setup anywhere on your property. You'll also need a solar charge controller to prevent the panel from boiling the battery. Shoot me a pm and I'll send you a photo of our setup that protects the energizer and charge controller from the sun's UV that you can post here if others would like to see the setup. I also have a second one setup as a solar battery tender for the JD tractor that gets garaged over the winter. It's likely paid for itself in keeping the stout battery charged and happy for many years....

A quick gander at Premier1's website seems to show that they no longer carry the 10W solar panels and associated frames/battery boxes. Might give them a call to inquire about other sources and a system that will serve your needs. The built-up system I've described is far less expensive than their all-in-one solar systems provided one can do some basic wiring/connections per their instructions.

Charge Controller

1 Joule Energizer Options

some better pics of my operation got a raised bed below and stalls for chicks using our own eggs and a incubator