coop tour

The baby chicks & turkeys have moved outside. So, I thought I'd show you how the little red hen house "grows" with the birds. We first used this little house when we had just 3 hens. It has a roost bar & 2 nest boxes inside. The hens ran around the yard during the day & we locked them in at night. The door latches with a slide-bolt. The roof lifts off (with the strength of 2 people. Pretty sure it can hold-up in a tornado, though I hope not to test that theory). But, that way we can clean the inside & replace the roof with a wire top for baby chicks (see post April 26). When we got too many hens for this house, we made a stall for them in the barn. Then, my husband built the chicken wire"run" & it's now used for starting chicks outside, or seperating bald hens, etc. (Don't worry, it's not that crowded. Most of the chickens in the pic are outside the fence.)

Door number 2: This is a bigger chicken tractor we built to seperate breeding flocks. This is an upgrade, in that it has WHEELS! I just had to post this picture of the roof so you can see, anything goes. Yes, those are old, plastic, "for sale" signs. I have no idea where they came from, but with a little duct tape, they are waterproof, so we used them. All of our chicken runs have houses for night time with locks on the doors. We have too many hairy, nocturnal, chicken thieves in the country!

Door number 3: Is bigger still. This is the "turkey tractor" (currently housing a lame turkey & 2 bald hens). Also with wheels, nest box & roost bar. It has a sliding door to access the nest box, a trap door to drop in feed & water, plus a sliding door to the house, that we can open & shut without crawling into the pen (VERY handy when you consider how much chickens poop!) The ducks live in a dog pen, with a dog house & an old sled full of water that they try to swim in. That's recycling :-)