Considering Chickens? Q&A Just for You!

By Jennifer Murtoff, Home to Roost LLC

This article provides answers to some common questions asked by people who are considering getting chickens.

Q: What breed of chicken should I get?

A: Consider the right birds for your climate! For cold climates, choose cold-hardy, dual-purpose birds, such as the Barred Rock, Buff Orpginton, and Wyandotte. Their smaller combs and wattles prevent heat loss. For warm climates, consider Mediterranean breeds like the Leghorn, Minorca, and Andalusian. Their bodies are slimmer, and they have large combs and wattles. A first-time owner may have better success with all the same breed or a flock made up of all large fowl, rather than a flock that includes bantams. See Henderson’s Breed Chart for more detailed info on breeds.

Plymouth Rocks are good cold-hardy breeds and Leghorns are great for warm climates.

Q: Do I need a rooster to get eggs?

A: Nope! Your hens will lay on their own. If you want to hatch chicks, you’ll need a rooster. A rooster also helps protect the flock and keeps peace among the hens.

Nutrena NatureWise provides optimal nutrition for your birds.

Q: Can I feed them table scraps?

A: Fruit and veggie scraps are fine, but make sure that 85% or more of their diet comes from a quality, balanced layer ration. A properly formulated layer feed like Nutrena® NatureWise® supports the immune system, provides important nutrients for great eggs, and supports healthy and effective digestion.

Q: Will I get eggs all the time, and how many?

A: Different breeds lay different numbers of eggs. You can get a rough idea of how many eggs per breed on Henderson’s Breed Chart. Your girls will lay the most during their first 2 to 3 years of life but will likely continue to lay for several years afterwards. They generally stop laying during the winter, but with a few tricks like supplemental lighting, you can maximize your winter eggs. Your hens will start to lay again in the spring. Female birds also stop laying when they’re molting (losing and regrowing their feathers). Sometimes a hen will go broody and want to hatch eggs. When this happens, she’ll stop laying. Following some simple tips can help your hens lay their best.

Your hens will lay different numbers of eggs based on several factors.

 

Q: How do I know when my chicken is sick, and what do I do about it?

It’s important to develop a relationship with a vet who can care for your birds.

A: Chickens are very good at hiding signs of illness, so try to pick up your birds on a regular basis to know what is normal for their bodies and weight. Also know what behaviors are normal. Weight loss and changes from routine can indicate something is wrong. Establish a relationship with an avian or poultry vet in your area, and have an emergency fund for veterinary services. Your state’s agricultural extension office may be a good resource as well. Put together a chicken first-aid kit, including a hospital cage. Get your birds used to being handled in case they have to be treated.

Pullets at point of lay have small, pink combs and wattles, which become larger and more red as they mature.

Q: Should I get chicks or older birds?

A: Chicks are great because they become tame the more you handle them. But they are messy and should be kept in a brooder box (often in the house!). You can also get pullets at point of lay (female birds that are about 20 weeks old). If they were not handled a lot, they may be skittish and wary of humans, but they will lay eggs sooner. You may also adopt a flock of older birds.

Q: Can I add new birds to my flock?

A: Yes! Chicken math is a thing: once you start getting chickens, you’ll want more! But adding new birds to an existing flock can be tricky, so be sure to follow these tips. Also consider the source of the birds and observe proper biosecurity to prevent illness in your flock.

Q: Can I leave my chickens for a few days when I’m out of town?

A: Consider your birds to be a 24/7 commitment. You should have someone plan to look in on them twice a day while you’re away. Morning care should include letting them out of the coop, feeding, and watering. In the evening, around dusk, have your sitter put them back in the coop and collect eggs. The sitter should also monitor for any signs of predators or injury. If you have a veterinarian, provide his or her contact information. Read this post for additional tips.

Q: What kind of housing do I need?

A: Chickens don’t need a fancy home, but they do have a few basic requirements. The coop should be well ventilated but draft free; there should be some air circulation, but, in winter especially, cold air should not come rushing through cracks. Keep the coop and run as dry as possible to prevent illness and frostbite. You’ll also need to have enough space for your birds to prevent them from pecking one another: 4 square feet per bird in the coop; 6–8 square feet per bird in the run.  

Q: How do I convince my neighbors that chickens are a good idea?

A: Sometimes chickens are a hard sell, but they often end up being a fun neighborhood-building activity. Find out what your neighbors’ main concerns are, and then research solutions. Demonstrate that you are following best practices. For example, if rodents are a concern, you can run ¼” hardware cloth underneath the coop and run and keep food stored in metal cans. Provide your neighbors with resources that address their concerns, such as this article by a well-known chicken author. Invite them to go on a tour of well-kept coops in your area. Be prepared to make some compromises!

Most neighbors will come to love your chickens!

 

What To Know Before Building Your Own Chicken Coop

backyard chicken on grass

Are you looking to build a coop for your first flock of backyard chickens? This article has everything you need to know about building a safe coop for a happy flock.

The perfect chicken coop protects your birds from heat, cold, weather, predators, and diseases, while also being comfortable for them and accessible for you.

I’ve had chickens in my backyard for decades, and in that time, we’ve gone through at least three chicken coops. Every time we build, there are new lessons to be learned, but the fundamental principles always stay the same. The perfect chicken coop is big enough to house the whole flock, sturdy enough to withstand the worst weather, and safe enough to keep out the most determined predators. Perhaps most importantly, it is easy for you, the owner, to clean, maintain, and keep in the best possible shape. This keeps your hens safe and healthy as long as possible. In this article, we’ll break down the things you need to know before building such a perfect coop.

  1. Choose a plan that meets all your needs. There is no one-size-fits-all perfect chicken coop plan or design that will work for every flock owner, but there are a number of universal concerns everyone should consider before picking a coop plan. One of the big ones is capacity: How many and what kind of chickens is the coop able to safely hold? How much space your birds will need will depend on a number of factors. Free-ranging birds or birds with a run will need significantly less space than birds that will be confined all day; roosters generally need a bit more space than hens; and bantam breeds can usually get by with less floor space but need more vertical space. Your personal accessibility needs – how well you can get into the coop to clean and collect eggs – is another major concern people often overlook.
  2. Pick a location that will keep your girls safe and cool. As with plans, there is no hard and fast rule about what makes the perfect location, only a series of concerns to balance against your own needs and preferences. Shade is a big one; placing the coop out of direct sunlight can help keep your flock from overheating. However, building your coop directly under the trees can run afoul of another concern, which is accessibility to predators. Hawks will see a flock that lives directly under a sturdy tree as easy prey, and ground-based predators will more easily access your coop if it is surrounded by good hiding places. Finally, human accessibility is key. Building a chicken coop can take anywhere from a weekend to about two weeks, and maintaining a flock in one more than five years. Consider how far you want to schlep building materials, tools, chicken feed, and eggs to and from the coop. As you may be doing this every day for half a decade, reconsider before picking the spot furthest away from the house.
  3. Add enough ventilation for all seasons. It’s hard to think of a few wall vents as a lifesaving design feature, but for a chicken coop, having proper ventilation is absolutely crucial. In fact, it’s one of the best things you can do to keep your girls safe and healthy. A well-ventilated coop will bring in lots of clean air, which will help stop potentially fatal respiratory diseases like Newcastle and bird flu from spreading in your flock. In addition, ventilation will help keep your birds cool in hot weather. Even though modern-day chickens are descended from tropical junglefowl, they are much more susceptible to overheating than freezing. However, both heat waves and cold snaps can be dangerous to chickens. The solution is to have a lot of vents at all heights throughout the coop, which will blow cooling drafts over your birds on hot days, but to have those vents be closeable. In the winter, closing all but two vents at the very top of the coop (above the roosts) will help keep your flock both warm and disease-free.   
  4. Use hardware mesh to keep out predators. When it comes to keeping predators out of the coop, hardware mesh (also called hardware cloth) really can’t be beat. Its small holes (much smaller than those in chicken wire) keep out all manner of ground-based predators, and you can’t use too much of the stuff. Use it to reinforce your walls, your floor, your outer fence, and then bury some more at least six inches into the ground around your perimeter. The one place chicken wire is a better choice is for the upper parts of the run fencing, to keep chickens in and other birds out.   
  5. Customize your nesting boxes and roosts for maximum safety and comfort. Nesting boxes (for egg-laying) and roosts (for sleeping) are the two parts of the coop your hens will use most often. They aren’t fussed about what they look like, as long as your nesting boxes are filled with something soft (like wood shavings or straw) and your roosts are the highest available sitting place in the coop. Have 10 inches of space per bird in your roosts, and one nesting box for every three hens, plus one more than you need for if a hen goes broody or picks a favorite box.

Building your own chicken coop can seem daunting, but it doesn’t have to be. There are only a few crucial elements to keep in mind when building that, if planned for correctly, will result in a sturdy coop and a safe, happy, healthy, productive flock.

 

Chickens and Horses

Learn about the symbiotic relationship between hens and horses and how when raised together they both win. Twain Lockhart, Nutrena Poultry Expert, explains how hens can help prevent horses from getting colic and more.

Keeping Your Chickens Healthy This Winter

As George R. R. Martin loves to remind us, “Winter is coming,” and now it is almost upon us. While other folks might be worrying about preparing for the holidays or making the most of their limited daylight, chicken owners have their own unique set of concerns about the health and productivity of their birds.

One of these, as always, is predation, which remains a threat to backyard flocks year-round, even as many predators go into hibernation or migrate to avoid the colder weather. There are many simple steps coop owners can take to protect their birds from the weather and maintain their productivity in the face of dwindling daylight, several of which will also help keep winter predators at bay. In addition to those, however, there are always a few more things the cautious chicken owner can do to make sure their chickens make it through the winter unscathed and uneaten. 

Install an automatic door on your chicken coop. An automatic coop door might seem like an unnecessary expense, but they’re worth their weight in gold once winter comes and the darkness starts setting in earlier and earlier. Getting the hens in by nightfall is probably the easiest and most important thing an owner can do to keep them safe from predators, and an automatic coop door is especially helpful in the winter. As a bonus, many automatic doors are light-sensitive, so they can adjust the hens’ bedtime with the changing hours of sunrise and sunset, regardless of when their owner gets off from work or back from the store. The one concern for people in wintery areas looking to outfit their coops with an automatic door is to make sure the motor and other hardware can withstand the inevitable freezing and icing that comes with high winds and subzero temperatures.

Clear the area around the chicken coop. Predators, especially ground predators, are masters of hide and seek, and the closer they can get to the chicken coop without being seen, the more likely they are to view it as a safe and regular source of food. Winter, unfortunately, increases these opportunities several times over, between the fallen leaves, accumulating snowdrifts, and growing piles of firewood and unused equipment. Keeping these handy hiding spots far away from the coop and trimming back high grasses, low-to-the-ground bushes, and overhanging tree limbs will all help encourage prowling predators to seek food and shelter someplace else, far away from your hens.    

Maintain protection from above. Anyone with an outdoor run knows that hawks and other birds of prey are one of the biggest threats to homegrown chicken flocks, even in winter – while some species of raptor migrate, others do not. Fortunately, stringing some chicken wire or hardware mesh over the top of the run is usually more than enough to keep the swooping predators at bay. This remains true in the winter; however, harsher weather and heavier precipitation – snow, hail, freezing rain – means this high-strung chicken wire is one of the coop’s most vulnerable defenses. Owners should check its impregnability regularly, especially after a particularly heavy storm or other weather event.

Keep your coop clear of snow and ice. The annual battle against ice dams is a long, cold, exhausting one. However, chicken coops present another, smaller front in the war. After all, ice dams on the chicken coop present all the usual risks of warping and leaking, which is just as unpleasant for your chickens as it is for you, in addition to the question of that warping and weakening presenting the perfect holes to allow weasels, snakes, and other predators into the coop. These holes are especially troublesome in the winter, when the coop is more appealing to intruders, not only an all-you-can-eat buffet, but also a warm shelter from the harsh weather outside.

Clean up after your hens. Most predators will be dealing with a decrease in food sources in winter, which will make not only your hens, but their leftovers significantly more appealing to hungry predators, especially rats and other small creatures to whom some leftover chicken feed would be a significant boost in their diet. Making a pass at the end of the day, or at least every few days, to clean up any food scraps, feed piles, etc. lying around the coop and especially the run will go a long way in discouraging these foragers from making a habit of dinning at the Chicken Coop Market, which would inevitably escalate into stealing eggs and maybe even chicks.

There are many reasons winter presents a special challenge for chicken owners, from decreased egg production to the risk of frostbite. Unfortunately, predation is just one of these challenges, and one that doesn’t go away the rest of the year, either. The good news is that a little prevention goes a long way, and there’s no reason that, with a little foresight and a healthy vigilance, your entire flock of hens shouldn’t emerge in the spring, happy, healthy, and fully intact, ready to keep laying, playing, and living a happy hen life. 

Free-Ranging Your Chickens

Free-ranging your chickens can seem idyllic and peaceful. Watching them roam in the backyard, pecking at bugs, can be soothing. But in reality, there are some dangers to be aware of. Nutrena poultry expert Twain Lockhart offers some tips for the care and feeding of your free range flock in this video.

 

Helpful tips:

  • Chickens will eat ticks as well as many other bugs that infest gardens
  • Free range makes chickens more vulnerable to predators, so be sure to place them in the coop at night
  • Egg Producer provides them a healthy balanced diet so they’ll continue to lay eggs

 

Identifying Problems in Your Birds

For new chicken owners, identifying when a bird in their backyard flock is sick can be a challenge. And knowing what to do about it can be even more daunting. Learn from Nutrena poultry expert Twain Lockhart what to look for, and what to do when you suspect an issue.

 

Helpful tips:

  • Because chickens are flock animals, they try to mask their symptoms so the other birds don’t know that they are sick
  • Some signs of illness include listlessness, loss of appetite, pale fact
  • Check for parasites under the wings of skinny chickens
  • Poultry dust can help to get rid of mites and lice

 

Bedding in the Coop

When it comes to bedding in the chicken coop, there are lots of options for backyard flock owners to choose from. Nutrena poultry expert Twain Lockhart shares his thoughts on the most common types, and the pros and cons of each.

 

Helpful tips:

  • Shavings and straw are the two most commonly used types of bedding
  • Do not use sawdust as it can cause respiratory issues
  • Avoid redwood and cedar as some woods carry toxins that can cause respiratory and eye issues
  • Use natural dirt or sand to lay down underneath the bedding
  • Your nose will tell you how often to change the bedding

 

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