Big Island Chickens

Eggs! Well, Egg! Lots happening but one of the girls gave us our first egg! We got them, our hens, just 11 days ago and after all the reading, we expected to have to wait a bit longer. What, with all the stress of re-location, wing clipping, internment inside the coop for a week neither JoAnn nor I thought it would happen for another week or so at least.  But here it is, I half expected a mis-shapen thing but then remembered these were proven layers, granted, this statement may have been an overzealous sales pitch from the old owner, but it is egg shaped and beautiful. It is also small. I haven't researched the size parameters of eggs yet, but when compared to the ones in the carton in our fridge, it is small.  JoAnn and I both heard the hens futzing around this morning, but when we checked on them no eggs. This afternoon about one-ish we again heard the cackling of a hen but thought nothing of it. At 2:30 I went out to paint part of the pen where I had welded i...

Nest Box and More Too many spaces, not enough chickens! Chalk it up to being a newbie chicken coop designer, or wanting to have the opportunity to expand the coop for more birds, or my eagerness, but I made a space of 24" x 72" to be split into two levels of six boxes per level. With the conventional chicken Math (explanation of the phenomenon of Chicken Math is coming in a future post) of 3-4 birds per nest I would have room for 48 chickens! However, this does not  jive with CMath tenet #4 which is 4 square feet per bird, or a total of 16 birds for the floor space I have right now.  I then went back to the drawing board and came up with this new plan. You can see in the photo I have 5 boxes with storage above and vertical storage next to them. Hinged lids and doors create the access to each of the three areas. Each of the nest boxes have a plastic tote for cleaning and routine sterilization. With the outer door access daily egg collection and replacement of the beddin...

Walls, Rafters and more Well, it's now time for the walls, so in making the choice to build modular units, I decided each wall would be a 4' x 8' unit. The floor is a double unit at 8' x 8', and each gable end, though not rectangular, would still be a roughly 4' x 8' unit each.  I am sometimes thinking faster than I can write things down (which means I forget a lot of the ideas I have) so I naturally assigned a name to each unit. Yeah, a bit simple, but this way I would always know which wall needed work, and what parts went where. I built this coop about 200 feet from the eventual placement site in our carport. I did this so I could work on the coop even when it was raining at the site. After I framed then skinned each wall unit with plywood, I painted each one with two coats of exterior paint. Inner side is white, outer side is light yellow. All exterior trim will also be white. I figured that it would be easier to paint while a 4 x 8 unit than in pla...