One awful summer I faced flock carnage.  I couldn’t figure out how my chickens were being slaughtered in the evenings, locked up in their coop. This went on for three nights and I was starting to panic as the body count mounted up. I was about 8 months pregnant – I hauled my gigantic body on top of the coop to discover hundreds of little muddy raccoon hand prints, and a corner of chicken wire that had been peeled away as an entrance. Grrrr.

When your chicken wire starts to get rusty, weak, or bent out of shape, it’s a good idea to peel it off and slap on a fresh batch. My sweet husband spent the weekend doing this for me, check out how nice it looks! The original wire lasted almost 3 years, but I was about a year overdue on this update.

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Be warned, my personal experience was that the ark was difficult to clean (poop and chips get stuck in the corners.) I actually had a family of mice move in one year!  Also, they are HEAVY so it will take 2 strong people to move it. But, they are cute and trendy and the chickens will be safe from most predators. Here’s my peanut in the foreground, homemade ark in the background:

Thanks to my buddy Rob for passing this one along!

Now I change water once a day, and they have ice-free liquid all day. Definitely worth the $25.99!

Our yard is quite small. We have a couple of acres, but it’s mostly a steep hill. The coop is built at the edge of the back hill. 2009 was a relatively rainy year, and the water flowed down the hill, directly into the coop. Every time it rains the water collects in the coop and creates a mushy, muddy, stinky mess. Good thing for my gals that I don’t mind some hard labor. Every time it gets muddy I don my muck boots and shovel out a layer of stinky mud. Chickens are notoriously wasteful of their food, so all the layer ration gets flung out on the ground and mixed into the mud. It smells awful when it’s wet, just a cloying, sickly smell. So, I have to shovel it into a wheelbarrow and haul it to my compost pile, and bury it.

If you’re considering a coop, keep drainage in mind. I am looking at my options, maybe digging some drainage tunnels behind the coop. Unfortunately it mostly rock and shale, so it’s going to be some hard digging!

I was most interested in the “stealth chicken coop” concept. Apparently people are making coops that look like garbage cans to circumvent the law. I’d rather change the law so I can get a hot pick eglu!

Angie’s Girls:

Our coop in progress is a variation of the Playhouse Chicken Coop (see image below). The enclosed run should be a huge improvement over my last setup. I can’t tell you how many times I would shake my fist and yell at the red-tailed hawks circling the open coop yard. I also learned (Ok, this could be snopes.com material, if they reported on chicken fatalities) that owls prefer to eat the heads of chickens. I once entered the coop to collect eggs and found a decapitated chicken in her nesting box. I was new to chickens at that point and easily traumatized. Johnny, our neighbor, must have been worrying about my impending nervous breakdown. Scott spent the next eight hours enclosing the covered area of the coop, which prevented future owk attacks.

Which leads into next piece of advice – be prepared for death, potentially lots of it. It’s very sad when it happens, but everything has to eat, and chicken tastes really good. I did have many birds that lived 6+ years, including Larry the rooster who died of old age. More about Larry later.