Predator Proofing and Drainage

It turns out, my coop's run isn't very predator proof. I purchased poultry wire, instead of the 1/2 inch square galvanized wire, so its not very strong and the larger holes make it easier for smaller varmints to enter the run. Mostly this more intense wiring is used for raccoons, as they can stick their arms through and kinda beat through this thinner poultry wire. As there are no raccoons here in Juneau, Alaska, I started to think about the local predators. The ones that would come by air, like Ravens and Eagles, would be detoured enough by the poultry wire. There is probably no need for the better wire for these guys....but the ones coming by land are a bit different.

Dogs can probably get through by digging underneath, so burying some below the ground level would help with that. As for Bears and Minks. A Bear can probably shatter through most any light construction, so if there is ever a bear problem, it will have to come to perimeter electric fencing. Minks are very sneaky. They can crawl through very small spaces, chew through wood, dig tunnels and more than likely, very abundant in population. By process of elimination, this is enemy number one on our farm, the mink.

I don't think there is any way of stopping a mink, if it decides to get into our run, outside of re-wiring the whole thing. So for now, I will play the odds that the mink will not attack by day, and keep my chickens in their metal hen house at night. I feel pretty good about the hen house, once I beef up the bottom of it with some more metal sheathing it should be pretty tough for a mink to crack. So for now, I can only beef up the run from dogs by burying some poultry wire about 8-10 inches around the perimeter of my run.

I started digging and realized this would be a perfect time to get some drainage around my coop as well. I dug a trench around the three high sides of my run about 8-10 inches deep. I put in some temporary boards I had laying around to sort of raise the sides to maybe hold more litter in the run. I then stapled some poultry wire to those boards and ran it down into the ground. I had some 4 inch black drainage tubing laying around the house so I perforated that, and stretched it out around the trench. I decided to fill the trench with beach rock, rather than filling it with the removed soil. Beach rock is very abundant in Juneau, and is good to have near the chickens for grit and they peck at the shells found in it for calcium....oh, and its free. So the removed soil was relocated and the trench was filled with beach rock.

We loaded up my Jeep with 4 buckets and a shovel and drove the 2 blocks to the beach and filled them up with some small-ish gravel we found at a local rock skipping spot. Nicholas skipped rocks while I shoveled away...3 trips and we had it filled. There is so much available I may even create some paths to the egg door, that will make for easy snow removal. I also am thinking of going ahead and continuing the trench all the way around as to promote high and dry soil in the chicken run. (I have to bury wire over there anyway) This will aid when they are dusting up and seems like it will work, but as winter slowly approaches, I really can't predict too far ahead. Im just going to take it one day at a time.

Hen House

There has been a lot of minor construction since we started our backyard chicken farm. We erected some fencing, a few fence doors were put in, completed a woodshed floor as to have a place for the straw and wood chips we need, and of course our coop/hen house.
By far, the most challenging part was getting a decent hen house built. It had to have roosts, laying boxes, chicken access, electricity, white light, heat, ventilation, food and water, human access to gather eggs, and in the end...it needed to be predator proof as well as able to handle an Alaskan winter. To say the least, the rest of the light construction was sort of caveman-ish compared to that!

The first major re-build, was due to my own rookie mistakes...I was wrong when I thought that chickens slept in their laying area. I assumed the chickens slept in their nests every night, and laid eggs there as well. So I constructed our first design to have six laying nests and no roosts. Then, as I learned how chickens slept in roosts and shared laying nests. I put in the roosts above the second story of nests to solve this mis-step, and figured they would just have extra area to lay eggs.

This first change may have been okay, except, the roosts were too close to the ceiling of the hen house, and this put the chickens dangerously close to electrical wires and fire hazards. Lowering only the roosts themselves would make the top laying boxes the highest roosts. Chickens sleep in the highest available space they can roost on, and they poop a lot when they sleep. If they were to roost on the top laying boxes, the eggs they lay would get really dirty, and can spread salmonella a lot easier. So the top floor had to go, as seen here on the top photo. I also, put in a thermometer that is easy to read, and 2 lights on timers more centrally located on the ceiling.

Next up, food and water. So the weather here in Juneau, Alaska basically hovers in the 40°-50 °F realm, and it is cloudy a lot of the time. In the winter, we can get blistering clear cold days and even get blizzards where temperatures can drop below freezing for a couple of days at a time.I don't have any practical application experience, but from what I read, chickens will hunker down in their hen house during such storms, yet want to venture out on the clear days. Without a heating device, the water in the chicken run will most definitely freeze during below freezing temperatures, so I wanted to put both a food and water source in the hen house, so I could lock them in there during a storm and not deprive them of nutrients and hydration.

We used to put the water and food container we kept in the brooder in there, but now that they don't have to go back and forth, we installed a waterer and feeder. I built the feeder out of wood, and mounted it to the wall. Nicholas calls it the Piano feeder ...because it looks like an upright piano. We also bought some bird watering nipples, that the chicks drink from, they are designed specifically for chickens.You just drill a 3/8 hole in the bottom of any plastic container, pop um in, and you got yourself a watering system the chicks cannot contaminate.  So we made a small one, hung it in the hen house.

The last modification was installing my thermostat to regulate the temperature in the hen house from fluctuating due to wind or sun. I have a thermometer installed at a low/coldest point down by the chicken door, and I have another mounted just higher than the thermostat. The top temperature is always 67°-72°...and the lower temperature is always around 62°-65°. I can't say enough about the thermostat. Not only has it solved any temperature issues I had, but it saves me electricity. If the sun shows up, the light is hardly on at all. When its cold, the heat lamp is on around 70% of the time, usually 40 minutes on and 20 minutes off, give or take. Maybe some hardcore types will scoff at such an extravagant set up. I really just wanted to make it so I didn't have to do much thinking. :)

UPDATE: Originally I stated the following: "The top temperature is always 67°-72°...and the lower temperature is always around 62°-65°" But after the hens had full down plumage, the thermostat was lowered to 50° (just enough to keep their drinking water from freezing, which all drinking water is housed in the hen house during winter), making the top temperature 50° and the lower temperature 40°. I didn't want to mis-lead folks into thinking that I keep my hen house at a toasty 70°.

From Chicks...To Chickens

I swear, right before I left for work one morning, I let the chicks out onto their run...and when I returned home in the evening, they were full blown chickens. I don't know what happend? They seemed to grow up overnight. We haven't given our chicks names per say...but Nicholas lovingly calls this chicken "Fatty Brave-y" because its the fattest bravest chicken we have. It also has the brightest comb of all the others. My guess, is that Fatty Brave-y most likely is a rooster.

This chicken gives off a cool warning cackle whenever there is a low flying Blue Jay around. and sometimes...(and I mean only sometimes), this bird seems to patrol the other four...corrals them...or does what Nicholas and I call a "body slam". A Fatty Brave-y Body Slam is performed from a high point in the chicken run, usually from the front door or the ramp itself, then a big jump and flap of the wings, only to come down 9 out of 10 times right on top of another chicken. Im trying to catch it on video, but its hard to know when a body slam is about to happen. Ive seen other ones in our flock do the same thing, but Fatty Brave-y is the best at hitting the target, and avoiding collision with the chicken wire or other obstacles.

The flock is healthy and happy and live full time in their new coop. At 6 weeks old, we are moving them off the 30% chick starter (30% protein)...to a 20% Flock Raiser...or Developer. Developer has less protein, and higher carbs, to kinda fatten them up. Also we have started on some scratch grains. Small amounts of Rolled Oats and Cracked Corn is sprinkled into their run every morning by our Chicken Wrangler, and we crush bread and oats together and mix it with various other scraps. By far their favorite scrap food is apple cores. We dice an apple core up into small edible pieces, mix in our oats/bread mixture, toss in any other lettuce or carrot pieces and it turns into an irresistible treat. I gave them too much the first time I made this, thinking they would regulate themselves, but they were at the trough for hours. Its important not to do that as they may get malnourished by filling up on greens and not getting enough protein, but the chicks have been free ranging and have been eating lots of slugs and worms. I'm sure it will all balance out in the end.

Auto-Eggs

Chicks grow fast. The photo on the left is a chick about 3 and half weeks old, complete with a decent set of wing feathers, a nice little comb coming in, and they have giant feet. The weather has been cool and sunny here this past week, and the chicks spent their first night in the hen house. It was equipped with a 120 watt red flood light during the evening hours, and the chicks were noticeably cold. My thermometers read an outside temp of 54 °F. They don't have all their feathers at 3 and a half weeks, so they piled themselves in the corner to keep warm. So I decided it was time to get more heat, so I bought a 250 watt red heat lamp to keep on during the night. I tested it and realized with the small chicken door closed it was too hot in there. If I left it open, they would get too cold. So I put in a burlap curtain to have this middle ground so the chicks would be comfortable. And the second night they were sleeping a bit spaced out and one even jumped up on the roost.

Now the chicks are comfortable, but with the door open it leaves them vulnerable to predators. Also, while I was testing the heat lamp, I noticed the timer thing wasn't going to work for me. The morning was sunny, making the hen house 85 °F with the light on, shut it off and it dropped to an ideal 70 °F. Later in the day the clouds came in and it got windy and cool, but with the light off, the temp in the hen house reached 58 °F. I turned it back on, and we get back to the 70 °F. Then later at night it got even colder, and I had to shut the chicken's door to maintain the temp. I have a full time job and cannot really hit light switches all day, and I can't keep leaving the door wide open all night. Not to mention winter is just around the corner, and any sort of miscalculation could cause the chickens to freeze to death. This is Alaska after all. What is a chicken farmer to do?

Luckily there is this great company called KKONTROLS. They sell weatherproof 120v thermostats specifically designed for barns and greenhouses. I picked up the simplest one they had on their Ebay store for under $40 shipped. They have dual purpose ones that run a heat source in the cold and some exhaust fan or air conditioner in the hotter temps, and some with remote sensors, or even fancy programmable ones. But I just wanted it to do one thing...keep my chickens warm, without over heating them. This thermostat is designed to take on higher amperage heaters and heat lamps, and has a 2.5 degree differential. The differential is the difference between the set temperature, and its upper temperature (heating) or lower temperature (cooling). For example: a heating thermostat with a differential of 3° set to 70 °F will kick on when the temp gets lower than 70 °F, and kick off when it reaches 73 °F. On the opposite side: a cooling thermostat with a differential of 3° set to 70 °F will kick on when the temp gets higher than 70 °F, and kick off when it reaches 67 °F.

In other words, I really wont have to worry about temperature once this gets installed, I can open and close doors, and the outside temperature can fluctuate all it wants. No timer guess work on how cold its gonna be on any given day. I got my trusty thermostat on the case. All I have to worry about is making sure the chickens get enough light, and keep my eyes on the thermometers I have installed in the hen house. And so the term was coined...."Auto-Eggs"!