Coop question? Don't want them to be squished.

if they are truly only in there at night, and have plenty of shade and rainy-day areas and so forth that they will use outside, 6 chickens would give you 2 sq ft per chicken, 9 would give you 1.5. However, probalby the most important thing is just having enough linear length of roost space that they can sort themselves out however they want, meaning that . Since a 2x6 coop really only has room for 1 lengthwise roost, I'd personally not put more than 6 in there. There is mechanically room for a few more but it depends how well they get along, you know?

5x5 isn't a lot of room if that's their TOTAL room -- I'm with you, 4 would be a bit tight already, I wouldn't want to put more than that in there. You probably *could* but it's not as nice for the chickens and gets riskier in terms of undesirable behavior.

Good luck, have fun, wishing I had your temperatures right now ,

Pat

 

I agree with Pat, not more than 6 in the coop if they are full sized chickens. Banty's could be a little tighter. I've lived in the Houston area (Sugarland) and it gets hot there and never gets cold enough for chickens to worry about. Chickens give off a lot of heat. They need a little room to spread out on your hot summer nights. And make sure it is very well-ventilated.

In the 5 x 5 growout pen, since they are young birds they need less space. I still would not put more than 4 and watch for pecking and cannibalism. I would put the dog house in to give them a place to get out of the rain and give some shade if they don't already have that. And don't be surprised if the roost on top of the dog house. Young birds of even big breeds can fly surprisingly well. You might want to cover the pen so they don't use the dog house as a launch pad to fly the coop.