As I mentioned in my previous post, we made a quick overnight trip to Atlanta for Jackson’s IronKids Alpharetta triathlon. My folks were generous enough to volunteer to get up early Saturday and Sunday to take care of chicken/dog duty for us while we were gone.
I am so excited to report that Atlas did GREAT while we were gone! As of today, he is on Day 4 of ZERO crate time. Yes, he still has moments where the flitty hens will catch his attention, but he is maturing enough to stop. He runs, but is clearly not running to chase, or more importantly, catch! It’s more like he does this bunny hop play move to entertain himself as much as anything. It is so nice to be able to relax a little about the activities in the yard during the day.
I wanted to go ahead get a post out today, as I feel very much like I am sitting in the calm before the storm. We got notification that our 6 originally scheduled chicks were shipped Monday morning. Since they didn’t come today, I expect them tomorrow. The ladies at the post office are to call me when they get there.
We are excited and anxious and nervous and really just looking forward to their arrival. BUT, after a relatively calm week, critter-wise, I do acknowledge that we are introducing yet another variable into our equation.
On the plus side, these 4-week old girls will have separate quarters for a while. The original plan was to have them in the original coop that we built. But that has pretty much been taken over by laying, and soon-to-be-laying, hens. So, we found ourselves in need of a way to keep these gals separated but still in the yard so everyone could get used to everyone else while the littles finished filling out their feathers and size.
I was planning to build a simple A-frame chicken tractor, something like this:
But, my mom remembered that my brother had a spare truck camper shell – turns out to have been from a truck that Jerry’s Uncle Don had – that would make a nice topper for a chicken run. So, we put our pens to white board and started working out how that might work. Upcycling is the in thing now, right??
I will tell you, I almost bailed several times during this project. What seems like a simple concept can get tricky in the implementation. In hindsight, it would have probably been simpler to go with the chicken tractor, but if we had we wouldn’t have the all-in-the-family CamperCoop™. Ultimately, we want wheels on it to be able to move it around in the yard, but for now, it just takes a few strong folks to move it around. It is designed to easily separate camper shell from base so that it can be removed from the yard and stored once the chicks are out and about. If it does become a more permanent structure in the hen yard, it definitely needs a coat of Barn Red paint in order to have it not stick out SO much like a piece of backwoods yard art. 🙂
But, it should do the job – giving these 6 chicks plenty of room to scratch around and stay safe from an overly playful livestock guardian and overly friendly (?) established flock.
Here are some pics of the CamperCoop™ project.
Until the next adventure…