COOP CONSTRUCTION
Consider these basic architectural elements.
Consider these basic architectural elements, whether
you’re building your own or plan to buy a pre-made
structure.
You know what you need for your coop, but how do you build a coop — or make an informed purchase — to suit your chickens’ needs? We’ll take a look at the architectural elements to plan for when setting up a new coop.
Coop Features and Decor
When it comes to making your ladies feel right at home, it’s all about the niceties. Think about it: the features that make your own house a home include cozy comforts such as plush carpeting, an overstuffed couch and big-screen television, central heating and air conditioning, and granite countertops, right? It’s a similar story with chickens. They thrive in a coop with clean and fluffy bedding, private nesting boxes, adequate ventilation, comfortable temperatures, and clean and sanitized food and water dishes.
With some architectural planning and interior coop-design savvy, it’s easy to ensure your chickens’ henhouse and yard provide not only the special touches that make chickens comfortable but also the essential elements that they need to flourish. Here’s what you should consider before you break ground on your ladies’ new digs.
Architectural Elements
First things first. Coop comforts begin with a discussion about the chicken coop’s structure and its conveniences. Your chickens’ yard and henhouse can be designed in myriad ways depending on your particular needs. Regardless of its design, however, the coop will need to incorporate some specific architectural features. It should
• be free from drafts and able to maintain a
comfortable ambient temperature,
• offer plenty of space for the birds to
stretch their wings and wander,
• provide adequate ventilation,
• offer protection against predators —
both airborne and terrestrial — and
• be accessible so that you can clean and
collect eggs.
Private nest boxes help keep stress down.
Let’s take a closer look at why these elements are important and how you can incorporate them into your chicken coop.
Temperature and Draft Control
When designing your henhouse and yard, you need to make temperature and draft control top priorities. Chickens prefer ambient temperatures between 70 and 75 degrees Fahrenheit — room temperature for us humans. Because the birds live outside, where temperatures vary depending on where you live and what season it is, you’ll need to consider architectural features that ensure the birds stay comfortable.
In warmer weather, the little ladies stay cool by drinking water; lounging under shade trees, shrubbery, or awnings; or chilling in their henhouse. Some building features that can help your girls keep cool include:
Chicken coops can even have a space for crops
on top.
• strategically placed shades outside the henhouse, such as awnings, tarps, or A-frames;
• screened windows that can be opened
and closed during warm weather;
• wall and roof insulation, particularly on the south and west sides, to keep the hot temperatures outside the shelter;
• outdoor misters that spray water and
lower the air temperature; and
• electricity to operate fans that will
circulate air.
In colder weather, the birds stay warm by eating more feed to generate more heat, fluffing up their feathers to trap a layer of warm air near their skin, and huddling together in the coop to share body heat with their fellow fowl. The trouble is that cold drafts and breezes blowing through the shelter and yard can wick away their heat. Wind can cause warm air close to the birds’ bodies to be replaced by cooler air. During wintertime, this heat transfer can cause a bird to chill. To make sure your girls stay warm, particularly in colder climates, consider these architectural features:
• a draft-free henhouse, particularly at chicken level (meaning on the ground or in their perches);
• double-wall construction;
• wall and roof insulation to keep the warm air inside the shelter, along with a vapor barrier to keep moisture to a minimum;
• straw bales stacked against the henhouse’s
north wall;
• south-facing windows that allow winter
sun in; and
• electricity to run heat lamps placed
strategically over perches.
Bottom line: No matter where you live, make sure your coop will provide a comfortable, temperate environment for your ladies. Doing so will keep them healthy, help them grow, and give them what they need to produce top-quality eggs.
Give Them Space
As semidomesticated barnyard critters, chickens need the right amount of habitable space to live in. Although some factory
Nest boxes that are accessible from the outside will help you
to remove eggs without disturbing your
hens.
farming operations have shown how little space chickens need, the birds will be healthier and happier if they have lots of room to spread their wings and scurry around the yard. Sure, they’ll sometimes huddle together in little feather piles under eves and in their henhouse, but they appreciate the room to roam — particularly any hens lower in the pecking order that are feeling bullied.
When thinking about your chicken coop’s construction, keep in mind that the space — including the yard and the henhouse — should be sized appropriately for the type and number of birds in your flock, as well as for their age. So precisely how much space do your ladies need? Take a look.
Chicks: Peeps and young birds aged one day to one week need less than 1 square foot per bird. As the chicks grow, their space needs will grow with them. Because they’re young and unable to defend themselves, they should be kept in a brooder or in a confined shelter, such as a fully fenced-in coop.
Pullets and young birds: Chickens aged one week through twenty weeks or so can move into an open pen (or one with an accessible yard) that allows 1 to 3 square feet per bird, or a confined shelter that allows 2 to 7 square feet per bird. Heavier breeds, such as Jersey Giants, will require more space than lighter breeds, such as Rhode Island Reds; tiny Bantams will require even less.
Adult hens and roosters: By the time the birds are twenty-one weeks, they’ll be fully grown. If they’re living in an open pen, they’ll need 3 to 4 square feet per bird; in a confined shelter, they’ll need 7 to 10 square feet per bird. Again, heavier breeds will need more room than lighter ones.
Birds are adaptable and can live in tighter quarters than what I’ve described here. But if you start to see behavior issues such as hens fighting or picking at each other’s feathers, poor growth, or reproductive problems, your girls may need a little more legroom.
Fresh-Air Friendly
Chicken coops don’t produce the most, well, appealing of scents. A poorly ventilated henhouse can be downright malodorous. Those odors result from the chickens’ natural respiratory and digestive processes. When chickens breathe, they emit moisture and carbon dioxide; when they digest food, they emit methane. Add to that the ammonia, hydrogen sulfide, and carbon monoxide that develop from the chickens’ droppings — not to mention flying dust and debris — and you have a stinky cocktail of airborne gas and particles that can affect the hens’ respiratory passages and overall health. That’s why ventilation is so critical.
Essentially, ventilation circulates the air inside the henhouse, allowing moist, contaminated air to exit while bringing in fresh, clean air. Your goal is to facilitate that airflow while reaching a humidity level of between 40 and 60 percent; any more than that and the moisture in the coop can actually be considered a health hazard because a host of viruses and bacteria thrive in moist air.
When designing your henhouse, plan to cut some ventilation openings near the top of the structure (out of the chicken zone) to give warm, moist air a place to escape and cool, drier air a place to enter. This is especially important during warm summer days because high temperatures could affect your birds’ health, comfort, and productivity. Most experts recommend carving decent-size openings — windows that are 1 foot by 3 feet, for instance — along the south and north walls, covering them with chicken wire, and constructing hinged drop-down covers that allow the windows to open or close as the weather dictates.
Predator Proofed
Poor little chickens. It seems like everything is out to get them. Whether you live in the city, the suburbs, or the country, your hens are a prime target for a variety of airborne and terrestrial predators; these predators threaten to take the hens’ eggs or the birds themselves. Prime suspects include hawks, owls, domestic cats, dogs, opossums, coyotes, foxes, raccoons, martens, skunks, minks, weasels, rats, and snakes. In really rural locales, cougars and bobcats can be problems too.
To determine which threats lurk in your area, call your university extension office, local Department of Fish and Wildlife office, or animal control agency for information — and traps, should you need them. You are likely to have at least one of these chicken marauders in your neighborhood, so it’s important to include some predator-proof features in your chicken coop’s design. What you’ll incorporate
will depend on which threats you discover, but in general, good chicken-coop protection includes the following features:
• Latched doors. Make sure that the entry door into the chicken coop, as well as the door into the henhouse itself, latches or locks. This keeps the chickens safe and secure at night, protected from nocturnal critters, such as skunks and raccoons.
• Fencing. Fence the perimeter of your chicken coop using close-mesh wire. This keeps the chickens in and the predators out. To discourage the diggers from crawling their way into the coop, bury 6 to 12 inches of the fencing with the end curved out; to prevent raptors from swooping in, cover the top of the coop too.
Well-built coops can be
attractive.
• Hole coverings. Cover all of your henhouse’s ventilation ports with 1⁄2-inch hardware cloth, which is strong enough to keep foxes and raccoons at bay.
• Hiding places and shelters. If you let your ladies roam free in your yard with no fencing overhead, include some hiding places and shelters for them to duck into should a hawk start circling. These spots double as shady, breezy places for cooling off on hot afternoons.
• Roosters and other guard animals. Of course, roosters aren’t an architectural element, but they do make great guards for your hens — as do llamas, burros, and well-trained dogs.
Easy Access
Chicken keeping involves chores. You’ll need to collect the eggs and feed and water the birds daily, periodically shovel out droppings and add fresh litter and bedding to the
Paint your coop and add a little
personality.
Add fresh litter and bedding periodically.
floor and egg boxes, and annually give the henhouse and yard a good scrub-down (or at least thorough straightening). To complete all of these tasks, you must have easy access to every corner of the coop. When designing your coop, here are some items to consider: • Human-size doors and ceilings. Believe me, it’s not easy working in an enclosed chicken yard that’s only 4 feet tall. If you plan to cover your coop with wire or build a larger henhouse, making it tall enough for you to stand will make your life easier. If your henhouse is a petite chicken-size one, make sure it has an opening large enough for you to reach inside.
• Droppings trays. Hens do a lot of their dropping at night when they’re fast asleep on their perches. As a result, the area below quickly fills with manure, which needs to be cleaned up periodically to prevent those dangerous gases we talked about from affecting the birds’ respiratory systems. A tray placed below the perches makes cleanup painless — simply lift out the tray and dump it in your compost heap.
• Outside egg access. Make egg
collecting easier (and avoid disturbing your ladies) by including some exterior access doors (with latches) to the henhouse’s nesting boxes. These will also come in handy when you need to tidy up the nests.
• Storage shed. Another convenient feature to design into your coop is a storage shed that’s large enough to hold all of your empty egg cartons, veterinary products, straw bales and pine shavings, cleaning tools and supplies, and feed and supplements.
Easy-to-Clean Surfaces
We love our chickens, but there’s no denying that they are some very messy birds. Never is that clearer than when we have to clean the coop, a critical aspect of chicken keeping (which we’ll discuss in greater detail in “Chicken Keeper Chores,” page 88). You can simplify this task by including some easy-toclean elements in your plans:
• Flooring. Chickens will do fine on anything from concrete and dirt to grates, wood and even linoleum flooring. The floors that are easiest to sanitize are the ones that can be shoveled, scrubbed down, and hosed out. Porous surfaces such as wood will work, but they are harder to clean. Sturdy mesh flooring
Happy, healthy chickens make tastier eggs.
over a droppings pit is an option, too, but droppings can quickly obstruct the tiny holes.
• Flat surfaces. Your coop’s interior design should certainly include perches and nesting boxes (see page 28) — but it should exclude too many other flat spots. The birds will roost on them and cover them in droppings, which you’ll need to scrape up later. My husband and I learned this lesson with the privacy roofs on our nesting boxes. Either eliminate the top in your construction, or just mentally prepare yourself to clean it.
• Fixtures. If possible, design perches, nesting boxes, and any other coop furniture to be portable so that you can lift them out and set them aside while you scoop soiled bedding inside the henhouse. Removable features are also easier to sanitize independently of the henhouse.
• Nesting boxes. In addition to filling your nesting box with bedding to absorb moisture and cushion the eggs, consider lining the box with something you can clean or replace, such as plastic sheeting, particularly if your ladies like to hang out in there.
• Drain. If you want to go ultra easy, install a drain in the bottom of the coop’s floor. That way, you can shovel out the coop, scrub it down, and send all the scrapings down the drain with a hose.
Let There Be Power
Light fixtures brighten up a coop, but they can also deliver heat and protection to your ladies. If you decide to wire your henhouse and yard for power, you’ll be able to install:
• A heat lamp. Necessary in very cold climates, these lamps warm up roosting hens and prevent frostbitten toes and combs.
• Interior lights. Coop lights can prolong your hens’ laying season as well as help you see what you’re doing when you’re inside.
• Exterior lights. Weatherproof exterior lights on motion sensors can help scare away some predators. They also help you see when you’re approaching the coop.
• Timers. Timers plugged into the socket
give you the ability to turn on lights or open and close pop holes (those chickensize doors) at certain times of the day. • Coop cams. Curious about what your girls are doing in their henhouse? Electricity also gives you the ability to hook up a coop cam so that you can check in on them from the comfort of your couch.
You’ll have to keep some safety considerations in mind if you’re going to install electrical elements. First and foremost, hire a professional to run the wires. Be sure to enclose all of the wire in the wall or inside peck-proof plastic or metal tubes. You should also cover any unused outdoor electrical sockets with child-safe plastic plugs so that the birds can’t electrocute themselves. In addition, make certain that the fixtures are safely out of their reach.
Even if you use a portable shelter or decide not to set up wiring, you could your coop’s power lights and lamps using a 12volt battery or even a solar-powered device, recharging it as needed.