Ribh's D'Coopage

[micstrachan]

I hope so too. You have such a cool setup. Are you going to disassemble the prefab and take it with you?

Probably not. I added 2x4s to the base to stabilize it and double as roosts, and I added a little box made of fence board thaf I thought would make a good dust bath (it didn’t… too hard to keep the litter out). That is anchored to the run post. Someday when/if I get chicks again, I may just buy another one. I do have three dog crates I bought for potential evacuation during the fires a couple summers ago that work for quarantine, see-no-touch for a sick bird, etc.

We actually moved our chickens in their prefab! It was a bit sketchy, but we didn't have carriers. We took the roof off the run end for better movability and loaded them into the uhaul just before dawn. They weren't happy, but were mostly sleepy, then we let them out at the new house to a new day/yard.

Clever!

 

[rjohns39]

Good evening folks

 

[Grammy60]

Good morning/evening everyone

 

[Ribh]

Straight to the water dish.
Soda is out & about more again & her mere presence seems to have settled things down a lot. Our weather is already starting to cool off so I am expecting all my rotten banties to come of the nests shortly & everybody go into moult. Portia has been having a long slow moult for months but she is a frizzle & they do tend to do that.

These two!
I'm lucky if I can get into my bed when I want to!

 

[MaryJanet]

Straight to the water dish.
Soda is out & about more again & her mere presence seems to have settled things down a lot. Our weather is already starting to cool off so I am expecting all my rotten banties to come of the nests shortly & everybody go into moult. Portia has been having a long slow moult for months but she is a frizzle & they do tend to do that.
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These two!
I'm lucky if I can get into my bed when I want to!

View attachment 2994074​

That's a huge pile of fluffy snugglers!

 

[RoyalChick]

Straight to the water dish.
Soda is out & about more again & her mere presence seems to have settled things down a lot. Our weather is already starting to cool off so I am expecting all my rotten banties to come of the nests shortly & everybody go into moult. Portia has been having a long slow moult for months but she is a frizzle & they do tend to do that.
View attachment 2994073
These two!
I'm lucky if I can get into my bed when I want to!

View attachment 2994074​

Lovely! I have been having a similar problem recently. A snuggle invasion!
I LOVE the blue and white goose vase on the dresser. Sorry - not meaning to snoop.

 

[Ribh]

Lovely! I have been having a similar problem recently. A snuggle invasion!
I LOVE the blue and white goose vase on the dresser. Sorry - not meaning to snoop.

I love it too! Every time I went to the garden centre I admired it so eventually I bought it. It is such a lovely shape.

 

[Shadrach]

So we had a catastrophic failure of the quarantine tractor this morning. It was slowly rotting from the inside out, despite my coating it in four coats of paint and two coats of varnish. So DH trotted off to our local Bunnings and bought the only type of hen house available (seems to be a shortage everywhere else!) $300 later, we have a new quarantine, although the footprint is narrower and I can’t attach the house to the ground from the inside with tent pegs to stop it being lifted up. I’m also going to pull the tractor apart and place the outdoor bit against the door so they have more room to move.

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To be an effective quarantine the hens outside the coop should not be able to touch those inside and be kept far enough away so that dander from one lot doesn't get to the other lot.

I went for 20 metres on the couple of occasions I've had to do it. Chickens in fenced coop and a temporary fence at a 20 metre radius to keep the existing at a distance.

 

[Shadrach]

Putting a prefab up in your coop would not be a proper quarantine for diseases. It would be a good solution for the integration process after a proper 2 week quarantine for diseases.

In my last integrations I have not done a proper quarantine for diseases. Mostly because I knew the tribes my birds were coming from carried a very low risk of disease and because I am really not set up for one because of my property. So I take a calculated risk.

A proper quarantine requires 6 feet of separation between the chickens. You must not use the same footware or clothes to enter both locations. It is much more involved than what I have done.

What I am doing is a controlled integration which you do after quarantine.

I could haave saved myself a bit of typing if I had read ahead.

 

[BY Bob]

I could haave saved myself a bit of typing if I had read ahead.

It's not the first time we have crossed advice.