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For city chickens, custom coop is heaven on Earth

By Mariana Greene, The Dallas Morning News, Source: MCT News Service

The city chickens moved into their new luxury residential facility on the eve of a big freeze back in December. They still had a punch list for the builder, but since the new roost was roomier and more weather-tight, the hens wanted to take immediate occupancy. Paint touch-ups and installation of the chandelier could come later.

They hunkered down in a thick mattress of clean, sweet-smelling hay and survived the cold snap without contracting the sniffles. Fern, who considers herself at the top of the pecking order, spent the night alone on the highest roost in the three-level building. Buttercup, one of the babies hatched Sept. 18, already was coughing and sneezing, so it stayed in the humans' house.

Not that there were no mishaps. Housewarming, in this case, had a whole new meaning. Violet got too close to the heat lamp and burned the feathers off her head. And the builder didn't heed his wife's warnings, as usual, burning a hole through the wood with a heat lamp. (Construction materials treated with fire retardant really work.)

I have kept backyard chickens in several habitats over the years and found all of them lacking. My husband agreed to design and build a custom version. After visiting local coops, studying photos online and deep thinking about possible architectural styles, he came up with a vertical, multilevel design with an exterior painted to match our house.

The project, I soon realized, would require many new tools, plus shiny new toolboxes.

With most of the yard already occupied by garden beds, the designer-builder had to prefabricate the structure in sections because the new complex was going where the old roost and run stood. Yet the hens had to be protected from predators, and my flowers had to be protected from the hens. That reality complicated the process considerably.

This we knew:

_ Hardware cloth, not chicken wire, is the best material for a chicken run. Predators cannot reach through the small openings in hardware cloth to snag a hen. Songbirds, which carry avian diseases, cannot hop through the openings in hardware cloth to eat seeds and grain.

_ Install the walls of hardware cloth several inches below ground level and fill the trench with decomposed granite, gravel or another material so predators cannot dig under the pen. A run also needs a predator-proof roof that does not block sun.

_ You don't want to stoop to clean the roost or collect eggs. The design, therefore, is raised off the ground by a foot, with a storage cabinet taking up the first level. The chickens can get under the structure in inclement weather.

_ Provide openings for ventilation in warm weather that can be closed when it is cold or rainy.

_ Install multiple roosting perches at several levels, and position them where droppings from chickens above won't fall on lower-level hens. Fern pecks any coopmate who tries to compromise her supreme position. Some hens like to huddle together for warmth and comfort; some don't.

_ Create a place for waterers that cannot easily be contaminated by droppings.

_ Include several nesting boxes in the design, depending on the size of your backyard flock. I've not been able to figure out what, to a hen, constitutes a satisfactory nook for egg-laying, other than privacy. We have three cubicles that are exactly alike, all in a row. But the hens will use only one of them. Some days a hen makes a depression in the hay bedding to receive an egg, and others follow suit, ignoring the nesting boxes altogether.

After months of weekend work days, the hens were hustled into their tidy, weather-tight new quarters at the start of what was to be the coldest span of the season, to date. The north wind blows against solid walls. There are plenty of roosting rails, whether a hen wants to huddle next to her coopmates or prefers solitary evenings. Their food and water are protected from contamination. They have room to scratch for bugs and stretch their wings, and the quiet ones can dodge the pecks of the mean girls.

I call it the poultry palace. The hens call it home.

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(c) 2010, The Dallas Morning News.

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