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Recently, I shared some photos of our new backyard chicken coop.  We designed it after talking with lots of 4H families who raise poultry – taking into consideration many of their horror stories about predators and pests.  Here are a few tips that you might want to incorporate into your own coop design.

• Consider using Hardware Cloth instead of chicken wire.   The holes are much smaller, which will prevent rodents from simply crawling through (or other predators from reaching through and pulling your chickens out in pieces!).  Also, it is stronger and is less likely to break under pressure.
• Line the floor with hardware cloth to prevent digging animals from getting in AND your chickens from digging out.
• Line the ceiling with wire, too.  Rats are amazing climbers and will kill a sleeping chicken if given the opportunity.
• After the wire is placed along the bottom of the coop, add soil/dirt/hay/mulch as a floor for them to walk on and dig in.  (Ever read the book, The Digging-est Dog?  Your chickens will put that dog to shame!)
• Make sure that you put some type of roof on top of part or all of the coop, so that they can have dry dirt to dig in and walk on (instead of living in a mud hole)
• Put a small door on the outside of your nesting area, so that you can collect eggs without going inside the chicken coop and getting poop all over your shoes.
• Have a larger door, too, so that you can go inside to snuggle your chickens, feed them and gather their poop for fertilizer.
• Make your inside / protected roost large enough so that each chicken has at least 2 square feet of space.
• Hang your feeder so that your birds don’t stand in the food and spread it everywhere with their feet.