5 gallon bucket nest box??

[Don 27]

I use old oil buckets and cut holes in the lids with a soldering iron ,Just big enough for my game hens to fit through.... I place them around the property and check them like a bluebird trail .

 

[Ridgerunner]

I actually thought my idea was unique and pretty cool with these buckets. I was just not sure if there was enough room. I still think it is cool but certainly not unique! lol Thanks for the link to the threads..... I think lol

Sorry to pop your bubble but if you are trying to be truly unique you'll have to get busy thinking. Some very talented and creative people have had some amazing inspirations. Some build from scratch, some repurpose all kinds of things. Some have an amazing sense of humor.

People have all kinds of ideas about what chickens need. When I grew up on a farm all those decades ago one of my chores was to collect the eggs. Most of the hens laid in the hen house but some found all kinds of places to hide eggs. Most of those were in the hay barn but not all. Some of those places were really strange.

I think it as you that was concerned they would not be able to fly/hop up to a 4' high nest. My full sized fowl do that all the time in my coop, they do not even have a perch to land on other than the 3/8" thick lip of the nest. No ramps either. They hatch chicks in those nests too and don't have problems getting their chicks down to the coop floor. When I was a kid the barn had a corn crib built into it. The front wall of that corn crib was made of horizontal slats so I could climb it. We had bales of hay stacked on top of that crib, making a shear wall pretty much to the ceiling. I have no idea how but a hen found a cavity along the front of that stack of hay and started laying up there. I don't remember how I ever found it but I remember climbing that 10' high corn crib wall to gather her egg every day, then climbing down holding an egg. Those were a barnyard mix, they had some Dominique and New Hampshire mixed in but they also had a lot of Game in them, a true barnyard mix.

Since you mentioned you are new to chickens I'll point out something. The egg and the poop comes out the same vent. Seems like that would cause contamination but nature took care of that. There are two separate plumbing systems inside the hen that end at the same point. When the hen lays the egg the portion that the egg is in extrudes from the vent a little, sort of turns inside out. Not much but a little. That seals off the poop plumbing so she can lay a clean egg. Getting dirt and trash in that plumbing would not be a good thing, the hen stands up a little to raise that above the nest and bedding. Some people seem to think she stretches for the sky but not really. She only has to rise up a little. Some of the hidden nests I found, especially in that hay barn, were fairly tight. I still like to give mine a lot of vertical room, not so much for the actual egg laying but more to let hot air rise in summer so the nests don't become ovens.

A standard recommendation on this forum is that a nest should be a minimum of 12" x 12' x 12". I've said that myself many times. When I built mine I made them 16" x 16" x 16". My stud spacing is 16" so making them that wide made framing really easy. If you cut a 4' or 8' board or sheet of plywood into 16" pieces there is no waste. I found a 16" cube convenient to build and install.

I once used a cat liter bucket as a nest. The top of that bucket was 7-1/2" x 11-1/2", certainly not a minimum 12". I set it at a 45 degree angle and they laid in it fine. But I once let a broody hen hatch chicks in it. That was a mistake. The first chicks that hatch sometimes like to climb up on Mama's back while waiting for the later ones to hatch. In that nest when they fell off they missed the nest and fell 4' to the coop floor. She was just too close to the edge in that tight nest. In a larger nest that is not a problem. Four different time I had to pick a chick up off of the coop floor and out it back in the nest with Mama, probably the same chick most of those times. After the hatch I retired that nest and built another 16" cube. The point of this is that it's not that they won't lay in smaller areas, there might be other considerations. And a chick falling 4' did not hurt it.

The point of all this rambling is to not be afraid of using your imagination. Maybe roam the streets on trash day looking for something to repurpose. You are not likely to wind up doing anything that hasn't been done before but you can be unique in your neighborhood. Just have fun with it. Build a pirate ship or make a model of the solar system. Use unique things. Just post photos when you re finished.