Encouraging exercise & sanitation (Getting 'em off the ground) = cotes

[Resolution]

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Facetiousness is resolved with a poop hammock.

I can't present a problem that a cote fixes that cannot be resolved with simply more space.
That's because a cote makes more of a limited space and reduces opportunity for birds to come into contact with their droppings and moulted skin cells. Properly planned out- any coop can be a cote with a few modifications- a cote can also eliminate fecal contamination of water and feed.

 

[Olive Hill]

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I'm liking you more and more every post.

 

[kathyinmo]

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I'm liking you more and more every post.

Enough "slinging," the poop (hammock) ....

I want to learn more here.

 

[BlacksheepCardigans]

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Oh my gosh, you rock the mike.

The issue is space. I DO have biology training, I HAVE done population ecology studies. There are certain things that drive all living things - food, shelter, sexually reproducing as far from their own genes as possible, and getting away from their own poop.

Give a living thing the opportunity to get away from his own poop and you've done 99% of your job. If you do that by building UP - as in a very elevated design; aren't cotes just cat condos for chickens? - fine. As long as the birds can get there. Obviously it's not a solution for silkies. But building OUT is not any less desirable OR any less enriching.

Never EVER seen a ground bird incubate eggs in a tree. Never seen or heard of one that regularly eats 4' off the ground. So those 8' nesting boxes or 4' feeding platforms are just as artificial as anything else; they're enrichment and birds have enough brain to respond to enrichment. But they're not the only way to enrich an environment or to provide enough space or to meet the bird's instinctive needs.

My chicken yard has hills, a stone wall, various surfaces including leaf litter, grass, stone, sand, mud, etc. Logs lay across it, there are small trees in it, and it's 50 x 100 for 20 birds. They are given dry food, wet food, baited water, clean water, and whole fruits and vegetables and meat daily. They roost as high as is comfortable for them to fly. I don't think I'd be giving them a better or more natural environment if I instead had a yard 20 x 20 x 100 feet tall.

Now clean coops - holy heck, yes, talk about clean coops. I get the GIANT squicks looking at half the ads for hatching eggs on this forum. "Deep litter" doesn't mean ankle deep in feces, people.

As an aside, when I was raising goats we could do a deep litter with hay, but shavings always failed. Hay would create almost a silage down below the top layer; it was wet and greeny-brown and smelled yeasty and got toasty warm. Helped everybody through the winter. Shavings got moldy and red and the ammonia was overwhelming. It got hot too, but you couldn't breathe and the mold was awful.

I'd be a lot more interested in/comfortable with trying out a deep litter with good grass hay, if it weren't obnoxiously expensive. As it is, I'm stuck with shavings that are removed regularly.

 

[Yashar]

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If you take a close look, there is plexieglass covering the place where they roost. It makes a nice warm-weather cote, but I would rather use wood for that part for the "improved" version. Plexieglass is quite expensive...

 

[kathyinmo]

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I have several breeds of chickens. When allowed to free range, they all stay within their own little family flock. That is my experience. Yes, many of them are siblings, and they stay together. Marans with Marans, Delawares with Delawares, etc .... "Birds of a feather flock together," I guess you could say...

 

[Resolution]

...Actually (whispering under breath) Junglefowl nest off the ground almost as often as they nest on the ground and this may be a reason why domestic chickens often prefer an elevated nest box over one on the ground- if given the choice.

I'm all for deep litter provided that its dry leaves.

 

[BlacksheepCardigans]

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Off the ground meaning what? Up on a stump or something? As Olive Hill pointed out, that's still the ground. They're not mid-canopy birds or even lower canopy birds. They have no instinct to make or weave or collect a nest and the young are precocial and mobile. Any hen that nested more than a couple feet up would automatically de-select herself from the gene pool because her babies would hatch, walk away, and fall off while she was still incubating the rest of the clutch.

There's a reason that we are providing them nest BOXES instead of attaching a forked stick to the side of the coop and telling them to go to it. They're ground nesters.

Every possible preference for laying hens and nesting has been explored. There are gazillions of studies on it. Hens will lay where there is material that is mouldable by their bodies but not by their beaks (again, a ground-nesting characteristic). They want a protected corner. They don't like a lot of traffic. All good ground-nesting instincts. If there's a bare plastic box a foot up and a pile of hay on the ground, they'll go in the hay. If there's hay a foot up and dirt on the ground, they go in the hay. Of course hens like elevated nest boxes; we make their nest boxes more attractive than the floor, so they will go in them and not get the eggs dirty. The other hens are mean as snakes and peck a laying hen, so they tend to go up higher to get away from the pecking. Gound-nesting hens get attacked the most.

If you offered the exact same conditions, including privacy and no competing hens, and had them choose between an 8' nest and a ground nest, that would be more telling. I suspect that my anecdotal experience from a whole heck of a lot of completely free-range hens, which was that the hens who stole clutches in the barn did so almost invariably on the ground, tucked between and behind things, instead of choosing the hay storage (which was up about six feet and easily accessible and often used as a roosting site), would hold.

Oh, and the one hen who did choose the hay storage lost all but a single baby, a huge clutch of sixteen if I remember right, for exactly the reason above. They fluffed out and went looking for food, fell off and died. She tried to take the last five or six with her when she flew down, with similar results.

I don't think anybody's saying that chickens don't deserve an enriched environment and a lot of space. However you provide that is fantastic. But nothing's going to change the fact that they're not arboreal birds, and so enrichment efforts that treat them like arboreal birds are not any more of a winning solution than ones that treat them like ground birds.

I've got a dog asleep on the back of the couch right now - doesn't mean that I "should" be feeding them on a shelf above my TV. Now I'm sure if I put a ladder and a shelf above my TV and put their raw chicken up there, they'd go, and it might even be amusing and enriching for them. But none of that would make them tree animals. They just take advantage of whatever fits their needs.

 

[knjinnm]

Has anyone ever seen a wild forest bird roost in the same place long enough for their poop to accumulate which would attract a predator?

 

[Resolution]

Blacksheep Cardigans, I don't want to quibble. We both know we are right and each of us believes that our own perspective is the more correct.

For anyone else, it so happens that Ceylon JF often take over the nests of pigeons, doves and other platform nesting species. Green JF often nest in subterranean caverns frequented by bats and swifts. Ceylon JF are significant paternal ancestors of the Fayoumi and by extension the Freisan, the Braekel Campine, Buttercup and Penedesencas who in turn are important paternal ancestors of important breeds like the Dominique. Green JF are significant paternal ancestors of all blue egg laying breeds.

My hens don't tend to nest in the hay very often either and when they do it's largely unsuccessful because its a mountain of hay bales. Hens nest where it's safe and up off the ground in a box is smarter than on the ground because four legged creatures can always find a nest on the ground. They may find an elevated nest box. The question is, how successful will they be in entering those nests or destroying the occupant or her eggs? Where is the rooster in this whole equation? Roosters determine where eggs are laid.
Creatures that evolved for tens of millions of years in exceedingly hilly ravine country or coastal mangrove forest have been domesticated to the point of not always knowing instinctively where to nest. As my discussion isn't about nesting its about avian respiration, feed sanitation and etc. - never mind- I'm not bulldozed. I can't debate against positions never stated. It's counter-productive to defend what I Have written through the narrow parameters you've constructed. I'll invite you to research what I've shared here.