Shadrach's Ex Battery and Rescued chickens thread.

[Perris]

I need to be able to rely on the pop door to open the coop in the morning. I've had the string chewed through twice

The weakness is the auto-opening mechanism then; your lovely ply coops in Catalonia would face the same issue if their doors were opened automatically by a string (but in those days you were on hand to open them in person of course, so no string on the door). Only the design that BDutch was recommending would solve that problem, and yes, that wouldn't work with a Nestera.

As for rats and weasels, all I can say is that they have not, to my knowledge, tried to gain access to the coops here - and I have seen both, though the weasel only once, so they do live round here. I assume the vent has been designed with them (and any other UK predator) in mind. To give some idea of scale to those unfamiliar with them, the vent cover has a diameter of 19cm / 7 1/2". Should something try to hang on to - what exactly? - while chewing away a baffle to enable them to get past, I would expect the chicken roosting nearest to give it a very swift and hard peck. For the compact design and the roost height and position means that a large fowl will very likely be positioned right there, looking straight out that vent. A rat or weasel finger would make a great snack .

My birds would not take an attempted home invasion lying down; they would attack whatever bit of a would-be intruder came in range.

On the mites, the Solway has more joins and hiding places than the Nestera, and I think you've made it worse with your modifications. That is very obvious at the vent: it is covered with mite eggs (those white dots). Every screw and new bit added has offered homes to parasites. The smooth continuous sheets of a Nestera are much more difficult for mites to infest. And the complete disassembly allows for a cleaning much more thorough than possible on a Solway.

I agree entirely with your remarks on space.

if I've understood correctly you feed your chickens twice a day for a limited period of time and take the feed up after.

Correct. It's not rigid though. Unpredictability is a deliberate predator avoidance tactic. And anyone who comes looking for handouts gets them.

 

[kattabelly]

Still waiting on some literature on that (unsupported assertion, by anyone, will not cut it I'm afraid; I want proper published studies)...

Having just had a very quick look, I suspect it'll be difficult to find anything that doesn't relate to commercial broilers or layers being kept at high stock densities, in systems where soiled & damp bedding can lead to ammonia buildup and increased risk of foot problems.

Obviously that's not an issue if you're keeping the floor under the roosting space as bare plastic and cleaning it daily.

I definitely have to change any bedding in the nest boxes regularly to stop it getting mouldy - or even maggotty, once, when I was away for a while and hoped a good layer of dry bedding and a relatively dry forecast would be enough to do until I got back (someone else was dropping by to top up food & water).

 

[Companihen]

Is Sylph better? She looks good in J's photo. Wet poops are commonplace at the onset of molt here.

Just ask the Peck-upine.

View attachment 4238268

What a wild molt she's having.

View attachment 4238271

Nights have been cold, and she's showing so much skin that DH suggested we get her a little turtleneck sweater (he was kidding...I think), and also mentioned having her sleep in the house, like we did for loner hen Barbara when her feathering was thin.

However, Peck's no loner, and roost poops show she's using her BFF Lil Nugs as a heater overnight. She's her active self every morning, excited to run out and dig in the orchard, so we're sticking with giving extra mealworms and letting her manage the ordeal on her terms.

View attachment 4238510
Photos are a couple days old. Feathers are starting to emerge from those quills. She should be much better this time next week.

Are you giving her anything special to eat or to help through this moult? I have a bantam frizzle who is having a terrible time this moult, she's approx 18mo. And is looking nothing like the beautiful Esmerelda she usually looks, more like a dinosaur... she's not eating a lot and moves carefully and looks miserable. Last night she slept in the egg box instead of the perch and our same age rooster was in next to her. That's so unusual so I'm sure he was just keeping her warm too.

 

[Mother of Chaos]

I suppose my experiences are somewhere in the middle. I have a Nestera size large, sitting on a wooden platform about three feet off the ground.

Drafts/Coop joins
Back when the first three were sleeping inside nightly, I checked them a few times on very windy nights and their feathers were (literally) unruffled. The primary gaps are where the walls intersect with the roof, well above their heads when they’re roosting.

Rain penetration
We rarely have horizontal winds, so there’s been very little of this, mainly around the door when it happens, and never in the nest boxes. I do have their poop trays, which irritatingly leave small gaps on the side, and I have a couple of inches of fine pine flakes in them. The nest boxes have hemp which gets dumped on the run floor monthly or so.

The pop door
This drove me crazy for a while. Among other things, the cord relaxed a bit during the night. (I didn’t have the automatic opener, which would probably have had me barking at the moon.) After a while (see below) I just said to hell with it and tied it open.

Heat buildup/ventilation
Those of us in lower latitudes face a real challenge with this, of course. We had several days in late March, around spring equinox, where the still-lowish late afternoon spring sun was blasting on the black plastic sides, making it too hot inside. We had to initially shade the walls of the surrounding run for protection. By summer, we had (and still have) the door open and back off 24/7. This is a geographically-driven issue, which those of us in the US, Mexico, South America, southern Europe, Africa, south Asia, Australia, etc. must consider.

The setting
Two big considerations here:
(1) as @Shadrach in the Severn Valley wind tunnel and @kattabelly on an island between the North Atlantic and North Sea have experienced, regular high winds and wind-driven precip can bring problems that the rest of us don’t have. Unless some sort of wind baffle were used, that might be insurmountable.

(2) my coop sits within a well-protected run, 8’x15’ (roughly 2.4x4.6m.) After a lot of hand-wringing, I decided to ignore coop security and leave the door open and back removed around the clock. (Now that it’s approaching the 30’s at night, I’m addressing the open back, more because of drafts than temperature.) In addition, the half of the run wherein the coop sits is covered on the roof and two sides with a tarp, reducing rain and heat issues. Not everyone can or wants to build a protective run, but it does take several demands off the coop itself, which is only used for nesting and sleeping.

 

[Mother of Chaos]

- I should add that one of the things that I like about the Nestera is that it looks nothing at all like the typical wooden coop, all right angles and imitative of a human house. Chickens aren’t mini-humans. The arched shape of the Nestera reminds me (and perhaps the chickens) of a small opening along the ground in dense shrubs and brush, where a hen in the wild might build her nest.

 

[BDutch]

I don't agree with you. What exactly are you trying to say here? I read this everything is different for everybody a lot on BYC. The evidence suggests there are more similarities than differences. Sure, peopls coops look different but essential the purpose they aim to serve is the same if good husbandry is taken into account.

I think I started to comment on:

the people who design these coops have some great ideas but don't know shite about chicken keeping in the real world.

And got distracted while typing. you are right, I did not get the point.
Most prefab coops are not what the chickens and caretakers need/want.

The ‘great’ ideas of the manufacturers in general are;
- The people who buy coops only have bantams. &
- Chickens don’t sweat.
- Chickens like it if they can’t fall down from a roost.
- Chickens like it to lay their eggs on roost hight (not below).
- The chicken keepers like to buy a new coop every 3 years
- People are rarely over 1.10 m/ 4 ft tall.

 

[Mother of Chaos]

- People are rarely over 1.10 m/ 4 ft tall.

As a woman on the taller side (5’9”/ 1.75m), you have just described my life!

 

[kattabelly]

- I should add that one of the things that I like about the Nestera is that it looks nothing at all like the typical wooden coop, all right angles and imitative of a human house. Chickens aren’t mini-humans. The arched shape of the Nestera reminds me (and perhaps the chickens) of a small opening along the ground in dense shrubs and brush, where a hen in the wild might build her nest.

Some of mine are roosting in a kind of semi-walipini (sunken greenhouse, only this one isn't very sunken) at the moment. If I wasn't on a granite hillside I'd be quite tempted to build a full on Skara Brae hobbit house just to see what they made of it

 

[kattabelly]

Neolithic hobbit tax: one of the new girls ventured outside the run today! For about sixty seconds, then she decided it was windy and scary and her sister was making worried noises from the door. But it's a start.

 

[Shadrach]

The weakness is the auto-opening mechanism then; your lovely ply coops in Catalonia would face the same issue if their doors were opened automatically by a string (but in those days you were on hand to open them in person of course, so no string on the door). Only the design that BDutch was recommending would solve that problem, and yes, that wouldn't work with a Nestera.

As for rats and weasels, all I can say is that they have not, to my knowledge, tried to gain access to the coops here - and I have seen both, though the weasel only once, so they do live round here. I assume the vent has been designed with them (and any other UK predator) in mind. To give some idea of scale to those unfamiliar with them, the vent cover has a diameter of 19cm / 7 1/2". Should something try to hang on to - what exactly? - while chewing away a baffle to enable them to get past, I would expect the chicken roosting nearest to give it a very swift and hard peck. For the compact design and the roost height and position means that a large fowl will very likely be positioned right there, looking straight out that vent. A rat or weasel finger would make a great snack .

My birds would not take an attempted home invasion lying down; they would attack whatever bit of a would-be intruder came in range.

View attachment 4239462
On the mites, the Solway has more joins and hiding places than the Nestera, and I think you've made it worse with your modifications. That is very obvious at the vent: it is covered with mite eggs (those white dots). Every screw and new bit added has offered homes to parasites. The smooth continuous sheets of a Nestera are much more difficult for mites to infest. And the complete disassembly allows for a cleaning much more thorough than possible on a Solway.
View attachment 4239465
I agree entirely with your remarks on space.

Correct. It's not rigid though. Unpredictability is a deliberate predator avoidance tactic. And anyone who comes looking for handouts gets them.

I'll come back to this later. There are a couple of inaccuracies that I should address.