Wood Preservative & Chickens Pecking Wood

[solarchicken]

Hi,

I will start building our coop next weekend and have decided to build a wood frame coop. The wood will be douglas fir I will get from the local hardware store.

The questions I have concern the chicken's behavior. Won't the chickens peck the wood posts, etc? If so, what is a good wood preservative to use? None of the wood will be in contact with the ground so I do not need to use pressure treated (ACQ) wood. However, I would think using some preservative on the wood would be a prudent thing to do but if the chickens peck the wood I should use a "chicken-friendly" wood preservative, right? Or, does it not matter, and what they get from pecking will be so miniscule to not matter?

We have a soy-based wood treatment call Timbersoy
(http://www.ecoprocote.com/TimberSoy-Natural-Wood-Stain-s/87.htm)
that we have used in the house but I doubt my child will be eating that wood we used it on. It is what I would call "no odor" sealer. We are wondering if this would be a good wood preservative to use. Or, perhaps we are thinking too much about this. But, a wood coop is not cheap and we want to be sure we can make this last as long as possible,so we know yearly treatments will be required. But, what to use is a question.

We live in the Albuquerque foothills if location matters.

Thanks....

 

[kateseidel]

Having only had chickens for a couple of months I don't have lots of experience. Mine will peck the wood once or twice - but since there's nothing at all edible about about it, they don't keep at it. Now, if I tacked up some greens....

 

[elmo]

In the many, many hours I've sat watching our chickens over the last year, I've never once seen one of our chickens peck at the wood framing of their runs or coop. Now, the wood is pretty smooth, and stained with an ordinary wood stain. If you had something with bark on it, or something that was rough or splintery (which would be bad from another perspective, too) they might peck at anything sticking out. But something smooth and flat, no, I don't think so.

Use a special nontoxic wood preservative if you want make an ecologically sound choice from the wider perspective, but I don't think the chickens themselves need it. Just my opinion, of course.

It would be quite a different story if we were talking about conures or macaws, of course. Hookbills chew wood to bits. Chickens don't.