Nest box and roost help...

I built my nest boxes into the wall of the coop, about 3' up. My temporary nest box was 4 pieces of wood nailed into a square, filled with straw and shoved into a corner of the coop. The fight over that one.

 

we used the lengths of trees that we took down in the making of the chiken run for roost... I have them cris-crossed to that they can hope up from the floor and pick a location... that being said: they all pile in the cross beam above the window. They're packed like sardines and I can only hope that they'll soon be too big to fit and go back to the roost. My hubby is going to make more at the same height so that they can all be on the same level and maybe they won't crowd each other. As for nesting boxes, I've seen many here that are on the floor of the coop. Some people use rubber maid bins or milk crates. Mine are up and out so that I don't have to enter the coop to get the eggs. Hope this helps.

 

I use a 2x3 for the roost for the big girls. It's about 4 feet off the ground. My silkies sleep in the nestbox but can hop up 2' without problems. My nestboxes are on my BYC page and are stacking plastic storage bins.

 

We went to a home store and bought stackable storage bins (about 1 foot squire) and screwed them horizontally to two 2x4(top and bottom). Put a little straw and two golf balls and they took to them. We are getting 10 eggs a day with 11 chickens. One still does lay her eggs under the laying boxes as she started before we had them in place.

 

I have 2 nest boxes, 12" square next to each other, the bottoms are 3 feet off the floor, the tops slanted down toward the openings to keep the chickens from sleeping on top of them. My walk-in shed has the box openings inside but my smaller chicken coop thet is only 4 feet high has the boxes on the outside with the chicken openings inside (of course) but the eggs are retreivable from the outside for my convenience. I sometimes have 2 chickens and one duck all sharing one box at the sametime. I also sometimes have a black rat snake using one of the boxes and dining on the egg in there. Any suggestions to make the nest boxes undesirable to the snakes? The coop door is always open so that the chickens and ducks can go in when ever they want.