Nest Box Question

Hey BYC,

has anyone ever placed their nest boxes in a separate area from the roosting perches, or wherever they are sleeping? I was just thinking it might be a good preventive way to keep the girls outta the nest boxes at night. If anyone has done this please let me know what your results were? thanks

they'll just stay there at night if they are broody. It just means you have to get up early and let them out.

thanks

SunnySideUpGUAM said:

Hey BYC,

has anyone ever placed their nest boxes in a separate area from the roosting perches, or wherever they are sleeping? I was just thinking it might be a good preventive way to keep the girls outta the nest boxes at night. If anyone has done this please let me know what your results were? thanks

Click to expand...

Keeping the birds from sleeping in the nests is not that hard of a thing to do.....
......easier than having a separate place to lay IMO.

Keep roosts at least a foot higher than nests, they like to roost as high as possible.
1 foot of roost length per bird so they have plenty of room to get settled.

You can always 'train' the birds to sleep on roosts by blocking nests late in the afternoon,
then uncovering after dark or before sunrise in the morning.

I don’t know what your set-up looks like, how big your coop and run (if you have a run) are, or how you manage them. My set-up is not with separate nests but there are people on this forum that do have the nests separate, usually at the far end of a run. From growing up on a farm with free ranging chickens where some slept in the coop, some slept in trees, and occasionally some might sleep in the hay barn, having separate nests and roosts can work. They did not all lay in the coop either. As a kid I had a lot of fun trying to find some of those nests, but that was because they were free ranging, not because the nests were separate from the roosts. Most that slept in trees or the barn would still lay in the coop.

You may or may not have to train them to use those nests. Some of that is going to depend on your set-up, some on luck. Having separate nests and roosts doesn’t necessarily mean they will use the roosts and nests as you intend either. They may still want to sleep in the nests. As Aart said, having the roosts clearly higher than the nests helps, especially when they are side by side, but you may still have to train them to use the roosts and maybe the nests.

In Guam you certainly are not worried about cold weather for your chickens. You can have a really open set-up which means your coop can be mostly wire which is less expensive than most of us on the mainland need to use. Hopefully your coop is all enough that you can get vertical separation.

Good luck!

SunnySideUpGUAM said:

Hey BYC,

has anyone ever placed their nest boxes in a separate area from the roosting perches, or wherever they are sleeping? I was just thinking it might be a good preventive way to keep the girls outta the nest boxes at night. If anyone has done this please let me know what your results were? thanks

Click to expand...

No matter where you place your nest boxes they eventually are going to get soiled here is my way of dealing with nest boxes;

Nest boxes
In my nest boxes I fold a feed bag to fit (nest boxes are 1 ft³). When a bag gets soiled; fold a new one; pop out the soiled; pop in the new. Feed bags are a nylon mesh bag.
Frozen poop just peels off in below freezing temperatures and just flakes off in summer when left out in the sun to bake and dry.

I have 65 trips around the sun it is the best method I have stumbled upon.

Make sure the twine is removed from the open end of the bag it can get tangled around your birds.

thanks