9 week old chickens all sleeping in the nest boxes

[homeschoolmama]

My 6 girls (and a couple of boys) have decided to all cram into the two nest boxes and totally ignore their lovely 2x4 roosts each night. It's still quite cold at night (mid 30's) and I have a heat lamp in their coop, but the nest boxes are not near that. I'm wondering if this will resolve itself eventually. I guess I don't really care except for I wanted the nest boxes for the eggs in the future and hubby may feel put out that they've turned their beaks up at their roosts and are misusing the boxes...... I assume they will just do what they want to do?

 

[realmofthewoodsranch]

Are the nestboxes above the roosts? If they are, then the chickies are just doing what comes naturally, to sleep in the highest tree. They are still young, too, it might take them a while to warm up to the roosts. I'd cover up the boxes with wire or something similar in size that you can just set inside the box to block them out (if they're lower than your roosts) until they were getting close to laying and then open it for use.

 

[Uppity Peon]

My chicks seem to prefer to huddle in the bedding on the floor at 6 weeks. At least they hop up inside instead of camping on the bare ground now.

 

[vnploveschickens]

We intergrated our 5 girls about 3 weeks ago. They were crammed into 2 nest boxes. One started roosting about 4 days ago, another started last night. Slowly but surely they do start the roosting thing!

 

[hen-thusiast]

Our girls were utterly confused their first night out. We patiently sat with them and kept putting them on their roost. FINALLY - one figured it out...then another and before we knew it all eight were perched. I think it just takes time and patience.

 

[gritsar]

Quote:
I agree. Make sure your roosts are higher than your nestboxes and then cover the nestboxes.

 

[1birdlady]

Our 4 Barred Rocks are now about 9-10 weeks old, and they still huddle together on the floor of the coop at night. (Seems to me that they're a little too big to be doing this...)

What's up with that?

They have roosts; kinda "bleacher" type...3 levels, the highest is about 19", then descending down to about 8" above ground. They use them during the day.

We have 2 dog kennels on the floor if they need to get "in and under" something. They use those if there's thunder or heavy rain, or just to poke around in and scratch....actually they use only ONE of them...the bigger one, s we'll probably take out the smaller...give them more room to "play".

No nest boxes yet...DH is still working on how to incorporate these in the all hardware cloth house..with only wood framing.

 

[homeschoolmama]

The floor of the nest boxes are lower than the roosts, but the edge of the box is ever so slightly higher than the roost-like less than an inch. When explaining to hubby that I needed roosts higher than the nest boxes he set about to do it but somehow in the end thats how it turned out- measuring mistake perhaps?. We had converted our kids' old playhouse and the nest boxes are built out from a window so we're stuck w/ that height and in trying to give the birds enough head room above the roosts it got tricky. In some ways it would have been easier to start from scratch building a coop rather than retrofitting something, but the girls seem to like it fine and so far this is the only issue, which seems minimal. He said he could raise the roost supports (he made them so they would lift out for easier cleaning of the coop) but we'll see. I think he feels very much "done" with the coop- he spent all his spare time on it and is burnt out. I think I'll try blocking off the nest boxes to keep them out for now and maybe by the time it's laying time they will have forgotten it was a good sleeping chamber. They do look cute all cuddled up in them tho...... Thanks

 

[jwchicklady]

My 11 week old's were doing the same thing--sleeping in the nest boxes which are higher than the roosts. The problem is that they crap in them, so I closed them off with chicken wire until they start laying eggs.