Am I the only person

[crazy hen quartet]

who has no "coop" for my girls?

We have a "pen" which is a 12' x 16' area in the back yard. The north and east sides are block and the west and south sides are chicken wire.

The entire top is shade cloth, both for protection from the heat and to keep the silly girls from roosting on the block wall that happens to separate my back yard from my front yard.

There are two roosts, one is about 3' off the ground and one is 18" and runs underneath a 4'x4' A-frame shelter area we built. It has no back or floor, it just provides a little more shade in the summer and a dry place when it rains.

Nesting boxes are actually cat litter boxes (new, of course) that sit on the ground.

The girls seem totally happy. We have no predator issues and no extreme cold weather issues so I figure we are fine. Anyone else out there have a set up like this?

 

[Renee]

Hi Crazy Hen,
Where are you? You are lucky you have no predators. We are in the middle of a city and still get raccoons and possums, so we must have a coop.

 

[crazy hen quartet]

OOps, sorry, I just realized I need to add a bit to my profile. I'm in the metro-phoenix area. About the wildest things we get in our yard are an occasional cat and the dumb doves that can figure out how to get IN the coop but not back out....

 

[SouthernLady]

We keep ours in a fenced in area around the barn. They roost inside the barn.

 

[ArizonaDesertChicks]

We live in Glendale, AZ and used to have chickens that were penned up in the morning till they had finished laying their eggs. They free-ranged all afternoon & evening and then roosted in our trees at night. This worked great until one of them was killed during the night by either a bobcat or coyote (we saw the tracks).
Even though we are in the city, we have a dry wash behind us and I guess predators also. We rehomed our first batch of chickens because we didn't want them all picked off one by one and we were not prepared to protect them at that time. Their new home was only a few miles away, but was more citylike (no wash, etc) and the chickens continued to live as feerange chickens with no problems there. We now have a secure pen & semi coop for our new chickens to sleep in at night (they still free range in the daytime).

 

[beerguzzler]

My setup is similar to ArizonaDesertChicks. I am in a suburb on the south side of Houston Texas. The coldest I have seen in in the last 10 years is 30ish. I back up to about 30 acres of scrub and have lots of opossum's and racoon's in the area but we have not had any issues (knock on wood). With that said, we have have lots of large dogs down our street that patrol the area so that probably keeps the critters away. The dogs visit my birds periodically, bark a few times and then move on.

 

[FrontPorchIndiana]

So the wind never blows there while it's raining? Around here the wind blows so hard the rain falls horizontally.

 

[crazy hen quartet]

it gets super windy here, but because of where we built the pen they are in a nice quiet spot between the house and two walls.... so any horizontal rain just kindof goes right over them.

 

[bills]

I would think that living in Chandler, your biggest problem would be the heat..Does it even get cold at night down there?

A coop would exagerate the heat, and the hens would probably not use it any way, now they are pen raised.

 

[FrontPorchIndiana]

Quote:
Ah, guess I'd better go unpack. And here I though I'd just found the perfect place to move to.