Livestock: Chickens - Raising to 1 Month Old

Chickens grow fast. They have been specifically selected over generations to grow as fast as possible with as little food as possible. Within a very short time they go from cute and fluffy to this:
It should be obvious from this picture, but they are outside after only a month of living. At about 2 weeks, they started jumping up to the top of the waterer. The top of the waterer is almost precisely half way out of the fish tank that they were living in. A quick trip to the dollar store got me three cooling racks which fit perfectly over the top but still allowed for air circulation. That said, they were only going to get bigger.

As I mentioned in my previous chicken post, we cancelled the coop order. That means the race was on. I had to build a coop faster than the chickens grew. My wife took the kids out of town for the weekend and I started building. The big lessons learned? Building something square and true on a grass covered slope is an exercise in futility. I ended up with everything relatively square except the top, front is about 2 inches wider than the bottom front. The other lesson is that it's a pain in the ass to build a structure where the trim doubles as the structural framing. Consider how impossible it would be to build a house by tacking up the exterior trim tor itself and then filling in the walls from the inside. Needless to say, I got it done with much frustration and copious amounts of swearing. I think it turned out pretty nicely.



One thing to note, I didn't finish the nest box at this time. It's ideal if it's not accessible so that they don't think it's a good place to roost. Speaking of roosts, that was something else I didn't install. They wouldn't have been able to reach it at 1 month old and I wasn't quite sure of the configuration either.