As night approaches, chickens, in their infinite wisdom, take to high ground for a sound nights sleep. They are naturally inclined to do so just as gallus gallus (the chicken’s wild ancestor) is. Roosting up high give the chicken and sense of security and puts it’s mind at ease. Unfortunately, poor planning on our part can result in chickens nesting in and above their nesting box. This presents a smelly and potentially unsanitary problem when you consider that chickens do half their pooping at night. This is just the situation I found myself in when I brought ten Rhode Island red hens under my care. As Joel Salatin says “If you are around any livestock operation, regardless of species, and you smell manure—you are smelling mismanagement”. So, I set out to improve my management.
A Coop Without a Roost
When my neighbors offered Hannah and me ten Rhode Island red hens they were getting rid of, we jumped at the opportunity. We already had plenty of unused out buildings that we could quickly convert into a chicken coop. I built a communal nesting box from scrap wood, spread out a few bales of straw, and admired our ladies spacious accommodations. There was just one problem. In my rush to put everything in order, I neglected to build a roost. The importance of a nice place to perch hadn’t crossed my mind. As a kid, our chickens roosted on the edge of the garden sheds gambrel roof that extended into their coop. (I would later turn that garden shed into a tiny house but that’s a story for another time.) Their roof roost wasn’t really that ideal, considering that the poop collected on the asphalt shingles and on the top of the nesting boxes below. A daily chore of mine consisted of scraping the poop with a broken hoe into a five gallon bucket and tossing the manure into the vegetable garden. Because my past chicken’s roost was a by-product of their coop design, the need to provide one for my current hens didn’t occur to me. A decade later, I was once again faced with the task of scraping shit. Worse yet, the girls were soiling their nesting box. Thankfully, a solution found me.
A Three Pronged Approach
While reading Harvey Ussery’s excellent book Small Scale Poultry Flock, Harvey described my problem exactly and offered a means of resolving it. By not providing a roost, I had offered the nesting box up as the only comfortable roosting spot for my hens. While I should build a roost, that would not solve my problem because the chickens, being creatures of habit, would continue nesting in or above the nesting box. This presented three distinct actions I needed to take: build a roost, prevent chickens from roosting on top of the nesting box, and prevent access to the nesting box at night while offering access in the morning.
Building the roost was easy enough. Using scrap materials, I built a latter 8 feet tall and with rungs 27 inches long. The 8 foot uprights were made from 2×4’s and the rungs were 2×3’s. I used one screw to attach each end of the rungs to the uprights, this allowed me to lean the roost against a wall in the coop and pivot the rung so the narrow end pointed up.
A more thoughtful nesting box design would have saved me trouble from the beginning. Had I built the top of the box with a slanted top (with the higher end towards the wall) the girls never would have roosted there. Adding the top was no trouble. Using yet more scrap lumber, I cut pieces of wood to the length of the box and made sure I had enough so that, when stacked on edge, the depth would be deeper than the nesting box. After screwing some cleats on the back, I leaned it against the wall above the nesting box and screwed it in place.
A bit of human power was needed to keep the chickens out of the nesting box at night while still allow them access in morning. In the afternoon, after I was sure no one was gonna try laying an egg, I covered the front of the nesting box with a sheet of roofing metal I had lying around. First thing in the morning, I go out to coop and set the metal aside. It’s not the most elegant solution but it’s only temporary. Once the chickens settle on the roost, their habit will have changed, and I won’t have to bother blocking the nesting box. Now, instead of scraping their poop, cleaning out the nesting box more often, and wasting more straw than I would like; the chickens’ poop falls under their roost and is incorporated into the deep litter below.
Listening to My Birds
While I only spent an hour or two putting together a solution, it is unlikely the problem would have arisen had I kept chicken nature in mind. I would like to think that good husbandry is understanding the instinctual patterns of the animal in my care and providing them with conditions that are mutually agreeable to both myself and the animal. For example, if I build a swarm trap (what I call affordable bee housing) it will have to match up with what the bees believe to be a good home, if I am ever to “catch” a swarm. Chickens don’t have that same luxury of choice. It’s up to me to listen to my birds when they do their best to tell me what they need.