Keep Chickens!: Tending Small Flocks in Cities, Suburbs and Other Small Spaces (11 page)

A henhouse should always have nest boxes (top right) on one wall and roosts or perches (bottom left) on another.

Suspend a feeder and waterer from roof rafters of the run, about 6 inches (15 cm) off the ground. If you have an open-roofed coop, put the food and water dispensers in the henhouse, away from the perch. Make sure the dispensers are away from the coop and henhouse doors and all foot traffic to prevent spillage.

Hang the feeder and waterer inside the coop’s run.

The perfect coop depends on you. You can be a minimalist. Run chicken wire around some posts for the run. Set a big wooden crate on short posts or thick, heavy bricks, cut a square hole in it for a door, lay down a small plank as a door ramp, and rig up a perch and nest box inside for roosting and laying. It can be that simple.

Or be laboriously elaborate! Add decorative moldings to the henhouse and coop framing to invoke Victorian, Bavarian, or Art Deco styles. Paint the henhouse crazy colors and hang silly signs. Or paint a mural on it of a Mexican cantina, complete with faux shutters, climbing ivy, and a sombrero, and hang a painted sign over the henhouse door that says “Casa de Pollo” (that’s “House of Chicken” for all you gringos). Use a French bistro mural theme and call your gaily painted henhouse the “Chez Poulet.”

The only limits to your henhouse design are your creative genes and your wallet. So long as your hens are safe and sound inside with plenty of personal space, the coop and henhouse design are up to you. It takes vision, chutzpah, and a certain degree of wackiness to add a chicken coop to your city garden. Why should our chickens’ coops be rudimentary when they can be extraordinary? The perfect coop is whatever you want it to look like.

My coop started as a lean-to shaped like a parallelogram alongside the house. The site available for the entire coop was narrow but long. I sank ten 2 x 4 posts in the ground with a concrete base, leaving 5 feet (1.5 m) of each post aboveground for the roof to sit on.

My spouse and I framed the roof on a slant to run off rainwater and topped it with corrugated tin. Tin roofs sound lovely in the rain. Along the eaves of the roof, we installed a PVC-pipe gutter system to divert rainwater away from the coop and into the yard. To make the gutter, we simply snipped away one-third of the diameter of the pipe, leaving a U-shaped piece. (House gutters would have worked as well, but they’re more expensive than PVC pipe.)

Next were the henhouse walls and doors. We built two human-size doors in the henhouse: one accessible from inside the coop and other at the rear, opening out into the feed and bedding storage area. We cut a small rectangular opening at the bottom of the front henhouse door so that the hens could enter and exit at will. We also installed a small slit of a door right behind the nest boxes. We call it the “egg door,” because it allows us to collect the eggs without having to enter the henhouse.

We attached the roof on the henhouse with two large hinges at the rear of the roof, nearest to the house. We can lift the henhouse roof and prop it open during hot summer days for extra ventilation.

Finally, we poured a decorative concrete walkway to the coop from the patio and trimmed it with river rock for a serene effect and to encourage drainage away from the coop. We planted native ferns, ivy, and other durable creeping and shade-tolerant plants alongside the path. The several shrubs near the walkway are sturdy enough to be practically chicken proof.

Once or twice a year, I touch up the coop and henhouse with paint and make whatever small repairs are necessary. Mostly, I just enjoy the coop and its residents.

I used to look down on the coop from a rear window in my house, but I could see only a sliver of hen action from that vantage, not nearly enough for me. I made an offhand remark to my spouse about this small dilemma. Have I mentioned my spouse’s nearly unhealthy obsession with electronics? Once word of my chicken-image deprivation was released, a solution was quickly announced. The chickens went wireless.

Wireless remote cameras, that is. We installed three of them in the henhouse and coop and then hooked them up to our TV. We can get up in the morning and turn on “Chick TV” to see what the Girls are doing, which is probably scratching and eating, but I guess I like watching that. If you love chickens as much as I do, you enjoy watching whatever they are doing. Believe me: To remote-view your chickens is to love them!

Design and build your chicken coop so it is as safe and secure from rats and predators as possible.

Most coops, no matter how ingenious and sturdy, won’t keep out rats completely, regardless of whether they are slim, surreptitious barnyard rats or fat, bold, slow city rats. Rats are expert diggers and tunnelers. If they smell chicken feed inside your coop, they will dig under the coop and pop out of a tunnel they have burrowed unerringly to right under the feeder.

I’ve tried subterranean concrete barriers. I’ve tried sinking lengths of fencing below ground. Neither worked very well to keep out the vermin. In my experience, there’s no sure-fire way to keep rats out of your chicken coop if they’re determined to get in. My advice: Be prepared for a long, continuous battle against rats.

I have found that rats are somewhat seasonal (at least up here in the Northwest). Rain in winter seems to bring them up out of the ground. Spring rat flings and resulting newborns bring rats forth like unwanted weeds in March and April. Things settle down during the summer and fall, as if the rats had packed up and gone to their summer cottages.

Don’t be discouraged. There is a way to deal with rats: poison. Poison is tricky, however, because you have to be crafty enough to give the rats access to the poison and bait trap but careful enough to keep your hens and other neighborhood animals out of the traps’ vicinity.

A few years ago, the city of Portland dealt with an increase in the city rat population by handing out “rats only” traps. These were plastic black bait boxes with a small hole big enough for a rat to fit into. The hole led through a short maze into the opposite end of the box containing rat poison. The rat ate the poison and left contented, then got a fatal stomachache a short time later. This trap set-up is quite effective, and I have never had a problem with one of my own critters getting into the bait box. Inquire at your local health department about these types of rat traps.

A bait box made from scrap wood provides a safe way to offer poison to rats without inadvertently injuring other local critters.

If your health department does not have bait traps available, you can build your own from scrap wood and nails. Construct a wooden box 1
¹
⁄
₂
feet (46 cm) long and 1 foot (31 cm) wide with a hinged and clasping or locking lid. Cut a rat-sized hole in the narrow end of the box. (Remember, rats can squeeze into an opening one-fourth their size.) Insert two partitions inside the box to create a short maze to the bait and poison location at the other end of the box.

If you’re setting a traditional “neck snapper” rodent trap, place it just outside the coop and henhouse at night. Set the trap inside a box just big enough for the trap and the rat. This way, there’s no danger of your hens or other pets getting caught by the trap. Bait trap with peanut butter for a couple of nights without setting the trap. On the third or fourth night, set the trap with the bait the rat has come to expect. You will probably have a rat to dispose of in the morning when you check on your hens.

With your coop planned and construction under way, it’s time to start thinking about your future pen of hens. Before you buy any chicks or chickens, it’s important to educate yourself about all of the different breeds. By familiarizing yourself with the specific characteristics of the many chickens available, you will be more likely to pick chickens that will do well in your region and meet your needs for eggs and entertainment.

If you have access to a computer, start your research with the Internet. The World Wide Web hosts dozens of sites devoted to chickens, where people from all over the world share their chicken stories, tips, and pictures. A few of my favorite web sites are listed in the appendix, and hundreds of others I haven’t listed are waiting for you to find them.

Many on-line hatcheries have chicken facts and links to yet more chicken sites. Some general information chicken web sites will lead you to great books covering every facet of chicken ownership, from urban chicken keeping to small farm chicken breeding. Before you know it, several hours will have passed on the Internet while you’ve been reading and thinking chicken.

Poultry Tribune,
circa 1940.