I’m pretty sure everyone has wanted to get chickens at some point in their life. They’re low maintenance, lay eggs everyday, and they’re very cute! As an experienced chicken farmer that has gone through the majority of the ups and downs of having chickens I am here to breakdown chicken care. I’ve only had two flocks so far but they’ve taught me so much, like how to take responsibility, being gentle and careful, and having lots of patience. I am going to be talking about the beginning of owning chickens when they’re just starting out, then I’ll be talking about tips to having a good coop, and finally, how to protect your chickens against predators, coop edition.  

When you first get chickens you want to give them a safe warm place to stay like a cardboard box with shavings covering the floor. Shavings are necessary so the chicks do not slip and hurt themselves because they are very fragile as expected. Then you’ll want to have a feeder and a waterer and make sure you never run out of food or water you’ll have to check in on it regularly. Make sure to have a heat lamp and according to an article by the University of Florida, the temperature should be kept at 95 degrees in the first week of their lives and should drop by 5 degrees every week after that.

Now those are some things you should do to ensure a good and safe development stage but to ensure a safe and secure coop for the rest of their lives I will use my coop I have presently as a good example. My chickens have been thriving  and are very happy in our coop because of a couple important things. First we have a nice safe insulated place with dividers between the nesting boxes so the hens can lay their eggs. Along with windows with chicken wire over them so nothing gets in but we have windows for when it’s the summer and the need for insulation in there isn’t necessary anymore. We also put the waterer in the corner of our hen house on top of a heater so in the winter it doesn’t freeze. We have many roosts in our coop so the hens can just hang out and they all sleep on the roosts at night. And to ensure that they don’t tip or spill the food so much or make a mess in it we hang the food from the top of the coop. Finally, if you’re thinking of having chickens, they need time outside to scratch, dust, and eat some grass. So a “run”, is what is called the outdoor pen for the chickens, is an enclosed space with chicken wire so no predators can get at your birds and has a ceiling to provide your chickens with shade and not to overheat them. A good tip to keeping healthy happy birds is to let them roam around. We've had numerous flocks before and we used to let them roam unsupervised, but there’s a lot of predators in our area so now we let them out with supervision. But if you have a rooster according to an article by Hobby Farms, Our Top 10 Reasons To Keep a Rooster, it will try and protect your flock and herd them into familiar grounds instead of straying away to unfamiliar places where predators may lurk. 

All of that was about having a good coop where chickens can thrive and grow but now I’m going to cover the topic of how to keep predators away from your flock. Many different owners have different ways to ward off predators but here the ones I am currently using and it’s working greatly. First, We wrapped our run with chicken wire so nothing could try and reach in through the wire. Second, when we built our run we dug two feet deeper into the ground and put boards as extra security because when most predators are trying to get a meal they’re not gonna dig over two feet to get it. Another thing we did to our run to make it secure, the run is very important to keep safe because it’s one of the most vulnerable places for a predator to attack, we put what’s called a “Sweep Apron”. It’s chicken wire laid down onto the ground and secured then we laid some dirt over it so if a predator starts digging at the coop during that it’ll very quickly reach the sweep apron and give up. Like I said before, a predator isn’t going to try so hard for a meal. That should be all we did for the run now moving onto the coop. We put chicken wire along the flooring of the coop then we put construction sand on top of that for easy cleaning. After the sand has been there for a while and has been watered, just so the dust doesn’t get kicked up a lot because that’s bad for your chickens to breathe in, it soon solidifies and is a great helper for when you’re cleaning and trying to protect your coop. 

In conclusion that is all the tips I have for anybody looking to own chickens and I hope this helped you. I can’t stress this enough how you absolutely need to have a secure place for your flock to live and thrive because otherwise you’ll be losing chickens left and right and stressing out the others. So to make owning chickens an easy stress free experience for the owner and bird I highly suggest following these tips.