I built a coop with an attached run. My question is, do the chickens have to have access to food and water over night, while they are inside the coop, or can it stay in the run? FYI....the run is TOTALLY enclosed, top to bottom, including hardware cloth beneath the stone, sand, and earth in the...
I'm new to this, but in all my reading, the primary reason for the red bulb was because it does not mimic daylight, so it keeps the chicks warm, but it allows them to have "dark" when the white, overhead lights are turned off.
My neighbors found one of their FULL GROWN golden comets being attacked by a red tailed hawk on my front lawn about a month ago. Last year, they lost 3 to a red tailed hawk INSIDE their barn. So, whoever says hawks don't take out full grown chickens is sadly mistaken.
Hey, if anyone is looking for silkies, I picked up 4 (2 blue and 2 black) using this add from craigslist. They're all healthy and feathering out really nicely. 3 were day olds which came directly out of a breeding pen with a broody white silkie and one was two days old out of an incubator...
Well, it's been a week since we got our silkies, and 5 days since we picked the rest of the flock up from the feed store, and everyone is doing well.
Here's our EE, a golden comet, and a blue and black silkie.
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It was warm enough the other day to let them forage for a few minutes. My 3...
I built the entire coop myself, but I'm really not comfortable doing the electric ......safety for the chicks and my children. So, Saturday I have an electrician coming to give me a quote for running a line underground to the coop, as well as installing a light on a switch and an outlet. I...
Thanks for the responses. I figured I'd put one on, but I was wondering if it was a necessity or not.
The silkies are a week old, and the others are about 5 days old, so I have PLENTY of time before they move out to the coop. They are in their brooder in the basement right now, and then I...
This is probably a dumb question, but this is my first flock, and I'm just learning.
I just finished building my coop with an enclosed run. Is it necessary to have a door to the hen house at the top of the ramp, if the run is predator proof?
Thanks in advanced.....and here's a photo of...
Here's the finished product.
For more information on the build, pictures, etc, here's the link to the coop page https://www.backyardchickens.com/a/fort-first-flock
Thanks for the kind words everyone. I hope I didn't kill this thread. I've been loving participating in it, it was just pretty devastating, after waiting as long as we did, to go through what we went through on Thursday.
Anyway, we found some silkies locally, 2 blue and 2 black. Here they...
The breeder was wonderful about the whole thing. No, she's never run into this before. Obviously, we were both heartbroken about the chicks. She offered me a full refund, or to resend a batch of new hatchlings, because we didn't want to traumatize the surviving chicks any longer. At first, I...
My first chicks ever were supposed to arrive today. They were shipped yesterday, and I was tracking them obsessively. This morning, when they were still in Florida, I got extremely worried, considering the fact that I'm in New York. I started making phone calls at about 8:45.
When the...
Hi folks,
Thanks for all the great feedback during this process.
Here's a link to the article I'm posting about the building of the coop:
https://www.backyardchickens.com/a/fort-first-flock