We are Jessica and Jeremiah; about a year ago we moved to the country and started working towards being self sufficient.
We purchased our first batch of chicks on 3/1/12 and started building our first coop that weekend. We spent a lot of time looking at coops on here to get advice and ideas on building a good coop. Our coop is made with recycled siding, an old door, and a recycled window. Currently we have 2 Ameraucanas 6mo, 4 Marans (2 hens, 2 roos) 6mo, 12 Black Stars ranging from 5wks to almost 3 months, 6 guineas, 4 Orpingtons (i think two are roos, they are only 4wks at the moment), and 4 RIR (I think we have 1 roo they are also only 4wks).
We have 3 dogs; one of our dogs was there for every moment of raising every bird. Our lab is very attached to all of our birds and he acts like they are all his puppies. I have so many videos posted of him with his chicks; he gives them kisses and nudges them to watch them jump. One of our pit bulls could care less about what the birds are up to, all she wants is the ‘dog candy’ as someone had said here. Our other pit bull we adopted after we already had some of our birds, we made the mistake of letting the birds out right after we brought her home. She started attacking them which made both of us very sick to our stomachs. I turned to BYC threads as well as any other info I could find online to see what we could do about this problem. Trying to contain the birds didn’t make anyone happy and it wound up costing us one of our blue Ameraucanas because she decided she wanted to free range and we didn’t see her leave the run. We spent a lot of time with our pit bull around our birds and somehow we were able to break her and now she’s very sweet to our birds.
BYC made raising our chicks sooo much easier, we just let our birds let us know if they were cold or hot etc. It took me a moment to understand the chicken math, we originally wanted 6-8 birds in a 4x4 coop now we have 20+ in an 8x8 coop.
Now all of our birds free range our wooded property. So far we don’t have any predator issues but we keep everyone locked up safe and sound every night. Our lab has taken it upon himself to mark the area around the coop as his territory. We really want a trail cam and we will be getting one soon to confirm whether or not we have predators checking things out.
We purchased our first batch of chicks on 3/1/12 and started building our first coop that weekend. We spent a lot of time looking at coops on here to get advice and ideas on building a good coop. Our coop is made with recycled siding, an old door, and a recycled window. Currently we have 2 Ameraucanas 6mo, 4 Marans (2 hens, 2 roos) 6mo, 12 Black Stars ranging from 5wks to almost 3 months, 6 guineas, 4 Orpingtons (i think two are roos, they are only 4wks at the moment), and 4 RIR (I think we have 1 roo they are also only 4wks).
We have 3 dogs; one of our dogs was there for every moment of raising every bird. Our lab is very attached to all of our birds and he acts like they are all his puppies. I have so many videos posted of him with his chicks; he gives them kisses and nudges them to watch them jump. One of our pit bulls could care less about what the birds are up to, all she wants is the ‘dog candy’ as someone had said here. Our other pit bull we adopted after we already had some of our birds, we made the mistake of letting the birds out right after we brought her home. She started attacking them which made both of us very sick to our stomachs. I turned to BYC threads as well as any other info I could find online to see what we could do about this problem. Trying to contain the birds didn’t make anyone happy and it wound up costing us one of our blue Ameraucanas because she decided she wanted to free range and we didn’t see her leave the run. We spent a lot of time with our pit bull around our birds and somehow we were able to break her and now she’s very sweet to our birds.
BYC made raising our chicks sooo much easier, we just let our birds let us know if they were cold or hot etc. It took me a moment to understand the chicken math, we originally wanted 6-8 birds in a 4x4 coop now we have 20+ in an 8x8 coop.
Now all of our birds free range our wooded property. So far we don’t have any predator issues but we keep everyone locked up safe and sound every night. Our lab has taken it upon himself to mark the area around the coop as his territory. We really want a trail cam and we will be getting one soon to confirm whether or not we have predators checking things out.
