Coop and run big enough?

[sharol]

So much of that (coop size being less important) depends on where you live. I'm in Kansas, and yesterday we got 15" of snow. The girls were coop bound from noon Monday until about 11 this morning (Wednesday). They were cranky, and they have quite a bit of room in my SECOND coop that I bought because the original one was WAY too small. My 7 girls are a variety of large fowl (and one Golden Campine who is a bit smaller, but feisty as heck). Their coop is 6x8 with a large run and some free range time when it is decent outside. My first coop was an expensive ($800) mistake, but it will make a good grow-out coop or isolation coop if I add a Roo in the spring.

Bigger is better in this case.

I would recommend rehoming some of them when they are past the time intensive chick stage, but I couldn't do that because I was completely attached to them by that time. My only option was to make other arrangements FAST. Winter was coming, and they simply couldn't have managed in the initial coop. My saintly husband refrained from telling me "I told you so" (which he had when I bought the smaller one), and he encouraged me to find and adapt a suitable coop.

Enough of my story. You need a bigger coop for 10 chickens.

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[yoie]

I had a feeling it was going to be to small. I don't think my husband realizes how big a chicken really is. The biggest bird we have is an eclectus and I think he's going off that size

. I guess I'll have to either narrow it down smaller or talk him into building a bigger coop

Thanks everyone for thier help

 

[elmo]

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Just to give you an idea, Buff Orpington hens weigh in at around 6.5 pounds, while the typical Eclectus isn't quite a pound. I'm also guessing you don't even confine ten Eclectus parrots into a 4' by 4' cage, either.

Additionally, chickens don't really use vertical space the way that parrots do. Then can't climb on the bars of their cage or flit from one side to the other. They hop down off their roost in the morning and spend most of their time scratching around on the ground.

I have only tiny bantams (between 1 - 1.75 pounds), so standard size chickens seem GIANT to me.

 

[Mamachicks28]

Yup, that does seem a bit crowded for 10 chickens. But didnt know about all the problems about the pecking. We now have 5 pullets (about 6 wks old) and will stop thinking of getting more. We had already changed their coop twice and still expanding. The current coop is about 4x5 and it seems okay for them now to run around but I can't image 10 full size in there. The more permanent coop is almost done. Haven't figure out the run yet. Meanwhile they are still indoors with us. I'm still new and just reading these posts are very informational. Thanks.

 

[teach1rusl]

LOL...yeah. I usually tell people to imagine X amount of cats living in that space, because two of my cats are in the 5 1/2 - 7 lb range, where many large fowl hit, weight-wise. So picture 10 cats living in that space...

...not a pretty picture.

 

[yoie]

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I can just see the cats now!
We have turkey vultures that seem to love our yard, I told my husband to build a coop using them as the guide!

 

[elmo]

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Even in a stable flock with enough room there's going to be pecking order stuff going on: that's when a higher ranking chicken reinforces her rank over one of her subordinates. Hermione is our lowest ranking hen and she has to be very careful as she's going about her day not to scratch too close to any of her superiors or they'll come over and peck her on the back of the neck. Imagine if there wasn't enough room in the run for her to find any little spot of ground where she would be out of the other chickens' way. She'd get no peace and probably no food, either.