If you go to The Chicken-Chick.com & Do a search on chicken coop bedding: sand, the litter superstar, there are directions on how to make what I call a giant pooper scooper. It's a neat article about the pro's of us using sand in your coop. The scooper is made from hardware cloth wrapped around a plastic pitchfork. It works really well. I use that plus a kids metal rake to get the poop onto the scoop, then I dump it all into a Home Depot bucket that we empty onto a compost pile twice a week. I highly recommend using sand. And my chickens love to dig in it for their dirt baths and looking for roots of old sod.