and Welcome To BYC! X2, you have to train the chickens to lay in the coop... If they start laying outside, locking them up in the coop for a couple of days so they get used to laying in the nests again helps. Do try and make sure the nests in the coop are attractive to chickens, dark, big enough etc. I gave up trying to make them all lay in the coops. With free range birds, if they have access to a lot of places outside that they would consider a good place to hide eggs, you usually wind up with hidden nests being an ongoing problem. Some breeds are a lot worse than others. I wound up putting "fake" hidden nests outside for them with a fake egg or two and just collecting eggs out of them like normal every day (old dog houses, buckets, barrels etc) it seems to keep the stubborn girls that want to hide eggs happy and I still get the eggs and don't wind up with a bunch of surprise mixed chicks.
