Another coop project?!
Yes, that’s right folks. We are spending more precious time on chickens. Currently we get about a dozen eggs a day from our 23 girls. This means that some of our ladies are retired, and that the short winter days are taking a toll on the layers. Shorter days means less eggs. Artificial light helps but doesn’t completely solve the problem.
A friend of a friend has a chicken in distress, so I agreed to take her on. (Her two ‘sisters’ were taken by hawks and she was the sole survivor. Her owner is devastated and thus entrusted her to my care.) Now, you can’t just throw a new chicken in with an established flock. That new girl’s life is at high risk if they don’t accept her, and the stress level alone can complicate life in the coop and cause fighting and lower egg production.
Happy chickens lay lots of eggs!
We add new chickens every spring to keep our production up. This means that we frequently have to monitor and control who is together, who is separated and for how long. It is similar with the goats too - different points in life require different separations and different companions. It is a dance!
Usually we just take them from the brooder to a small separate area in the coop and then give them room to run in and out but a doorway where the big chickens can’t go. In this case, I have one big chicken and three smaller chickens to introduce (I have three pullets growing out at a friend’s house which was which I was intending to leave there until they were big enough to fend for themselves) so this typical method won’t work, and I somewhat regret offering to take this distressed chicken because it is causing me quite a few complications.
We have a lot of room in our current coop and run, so I was planning to build something that I could just put inside our hoop house to give them a shelter and roosting place at night. It thought I would add some nesting boxes there for times when I need to separate girls for broodiness or identify the hens who are not laying any longer. As I designed the perfect little coop and separate nesting boxes - both which needed substantial roofs (the hoop house is not covered) and sturdiness against our very strong winds, that cash register sound kept chiming in my head. The design was simple and cool, but the execution was getting complicated.
So Thursday Mom and I spent a couple of hours preparing the hoop house for rain by adding a tarp and adding a door to keep them separate. I was planning to add nesting boxes, but none of these girls are laying right now, so I will wait on that. We put up a separate roosting area in the front of the coop and they will hang in there until the rest of the ladies accept them.
Roost area before bedding…
But then the freeze was forecasted and this morning I watched the girls huddling together in one corner of the run. I don’t think this set up will work. They will freeze. So, I ran around for 45 minutes adjusting my set up before “Scotch” arrived.
I ended up with a playpen set up where we usually set up for introductions, but with a top on it, no doorway in and out, added access to the heated water (had to move all that setup) and plugged in a heating pad so she can huddle up next to that until the new girls are friendly enough to cozy up. Sounds simple, but it involved two trips to the garden shed, one to the house, a trip to the barn, and redoing all my extension cords for the water and the heater (which I had nicely threaded through the lattice on the coop skirting.)
Our mini/transition run with new occupant, Scotch.
Just another example of how quickly time gets swallowed up around here - and this time for one darn chicken! But isn’t she beautiful!?
