Karen Walk wrote:Hi Milo - I love your fly-in-coop! Can you provide more details about it? How high does the entrance need to be? What kind of take-off and landing platform is needed? How do you accustom the birds to it?
I googled "fly-in-coop" but the only results I found were about "flies" in the coop, so any outside links or resources are appreciated!
Thanks!
Nice! Yeah it takes advantage of the chickens ability to fly.. (if you don't clip their wings). And none of their usual predators can fly! (Except the red tailed hawks and eagles ..but.. they're pretty awesome quite frankly and probably deserve a chicken every once in a while)
The smooth sloped face is key.. it prevents any predators from scrambling up to the fly hole.. We have our hole up about 5 feet. They fly straight up from the stand (see picture, we keep it about 3-4 feet from the coop) and rest themselves in the hole before jumping in.
Yeah they needed a little help at first.. We put up a board to the hole that they could climb up. (We removed it at night so they had to fly out in the morning) It only took a couple of days before we had a few of our ladies flying in and out. And chicken see chicken do..
I havn't able to find any other fly-in coops or online either.. an old timer round here gave us the idea.
But yeah no feed! We let them free range a couple times a week.. keep plenty of green biomass in their compost cage (list of plants above) and move them after they've cleared all the vegetation..
Experiment with it I'm sure it can be improved on.. Our coop is pretty heavy, even on wheels it's a tank.. ha.. The next one we build will be lighter
Have fun