New to group, question about roost height

[library910]

I am trying to figure out how high my roost should be in the house I'm building, given it's size. This is a 'small' house, designed for 2 to 3 hens only. The interior floor space is 3 ft by 4 ft. If I attach the roost (rounded 2 x 4) approximately half-way from wall to wall lengthwise, leaving only 16 or 17 inches on each side, how high can the roost be? How much space do the hens need to fly/jump up to the roost, and--for all of you with experience in this sort of thing--how high can they comfortably fly/jump in this limited area? (I figure with a 6 foot runway, even on a bad day I could probably hit a roost 2 feet off the ground. . . but 16 or 17 inches? . . .) Or do I need to provide some sort of ramp?

Thanks for any input you can offer.

 

[darkmatter]

Quote:
Two feet jump is fine for the hens, I would suggest you hinge the roost for lifting it up to clean (see my BYC page for pics of how I did it), however if you put a roost pole too close to the wall, it will get streaked by the roosting birds. I had to remove the top pole of my roost ladder when I found that out.

 

[patandchickens]

That's a good question and this is the right time to ask it -- a lot of people are not as foresighted

16" is not a lot of space. I can tell you my experiences with my original tractor (now departed, but its page is still up, go to the coop design tractor pages or just follow the link from my personal page). It was 2x4', with the roost just past the midline along the long axis so not *much* less free space than you have, and the roost was I think 16-18" off the floor? (It may actually say on my tractor page, I regret to say I'm too lazy to look

). Anyhow, the chickens *invariably* used the roof of the nestbox as a step to get up to the roost. I mean, that is what I put it there FOR of course, but I do not believe they ever went directly up or directly down *without* using that as a step. This would lead me to believe that the space provided in my tractor, with the roost at that height, was too narrow to permit them to get up/down directly (at least not comfortably).

From that, I would venture to guess that if you have 16" of horizontal free space, you probably would not want your roost more than a foot or so up.

Unless it changes other design decisions, though, what if you just attach your roost in such a way that it is easily repositioned -- then start it at a plausible altitude, and if it turns out not to work so great, you can easily lower it.

Of course, you could buy yourself a bit more space if you were able to run the roost the other way, making it just 3' long which is plenty for only three hens... that way it could be like 16-18" from the wall and still have something like 2.5' of free space in front of it. This might put the feeder and waterer in the flightpath of hens flapping down off the roost, which is generally not such a good thing and leads to collisions and spillage... except that if your coop is going to be high enough that you could put a wide droppings board under the roost and the feeder/waterer under THAT, then you might have a pretty good arrangement there. Something to consider anyhow.

Good luck, have fun,

Pat

 

[gsim]

Mine jump to the poop board at 24" ht, then jump to their roost at 48" ht. On the other side, they routinely jump to the nest shelf, also at 24" ht. They occasionally use the two walkboards I have that go to the nest shelf, but hop to 3/4 way up on them and hop up to shelf too. I had roosts for them from day 1 and they were tiny when they first started to roost, so I never worried about it. I have one out in the run that is 24"- 28" and they routinely hop up on it too.

 

[patandchickens]

Note that the question here is not about roost height per se, it is about roost height given that the chickens have only 16-17" of horizontal space to get up ONTO the roost, because it is a tight narrow space. So the real question is, how helicopter-y is a chicken?

Which is pretty different than "how high can the roost be with ample room to get up/down"

Pat