Last night we let them roost up in the pen as is their habit when the light fades before sneaking down at 5.30 to move them all into their new HQ. Mutterings and chunterings ensued but by the time the timer assisted door came down at 5.45 all were installed on the perches and were hunkering down for the night.
It is better apparently to shut or remove old coops or night arrangements so as not to confuse the hens, which we duly did. As well as putting a fence across the path down the side to keep them up in the top part of the garden and therefore more likely to find their new beds! So with all this set up for the next day's proceedings we left them to it.
The timer is set to open the door at 7.45am, which it duly did. I was expecting to see chooks dotted about the lawn when I pulled back the curtain this morning. But at 8.40 when I peered in the chooks were all still asleep and showing no inclination to get up! Puzzling this over I realised that in the outdoor pen they have been used to they have never experienced such intense dark as this coop creates inside. Even the moon and star light would affect them in the pen, and the sun coming up would wake them slowly. In this coop there are vents high up, but as we have placed the coop next to a hedge for shelter from the worst of the weather - wind and rain in winter and too much sun in summer (we can hope) some of the daylight is filtered out by the branches, so the vents don't let in so much light on that side.
It's quite odd to give a cockerel a wake up call, but that nevertheless is exactly what I did this morning!!!
So why was Iain scaling the wisteria this evening? Well, three of the black rocks had worked out where their perches for the night were, but the others has simply decided it was all far too much to think about and had reverted to branches and the wisteria seemed like a good bet I guess.
Herb has no excuse. Until I got him a few weeks ago he was pottering sleepily into a coop every evening in his previous home. He'll catch on. There'll still be one or two stragglers at the end of the week I am sure but it won't take them long. They do like to toddle off to sleep as soon as the light fades - it is hard-wired into their brains and the more sleeps they have in the coop the more they will recognise it as where they toddle off to for them.
It isn't the most perfectly designed coop in the world - we have discovered a glitch or two but nothing insurmountable and certainly nothing that could adversely affect the chooks' well being. (One thing I realised is needed is some means of holding the nest box lid open...With a wood coop you'd put a hook on the lid and a chain on the wall behind but this is plastic so Iain found me a bit of dog walk trestle leg. He turned my old dog walk into a lowered one ages ago and kept the bits of wood. Perfect!) Whatever the short-comings, it is still 100% better than anything in wood. The best thing from my point of view (and it is definitely on any chicken's Top Ten Best Things List) is the fact that it should be really quick and easy to keep clean and dry inside. This will make it very Red Mite unfriendly. Iain has made up some sheets for me to fit in each nest box and in the main coop so all I have to do is lift those out, empty them into the compost, rinse them off, leave them to dry and put in the previous ones - already dried - chuck in some aubiose and hey presto, done. Any cracks that red mite might have found nice and cosy in a wood coop are exposed to the air in this. So that will put them off too.
It is comfortable for them but very well ventilated too. I'm working on keeping the ambient temperature on the inside with them in it as near to the temperature on the outside - as that is what they hav been used to in their pen. And although the design is perhaps, well, a little off beat, I rather like it's functional 'look'.
I'll know the chooks really have it all worked out and are settled in when they begin laying eggs in the nest boxes. I won't know this for a little while because, although we could now actually eat the eggs (hoorah), all of them except Edna - and Herb - have decided that this is a good time to have a communal moult! Ergo, no eggs. Normally they do it in a kind of rotation so we always have one or two eggs here and there, but not this time. I suspect Edna will join in the feather fest very soon. Fanny Ann and Tilly seem to be competing for the 'who can lose the most feathers in the shortest timespan' trophy. It seems they will be fast moulters which, I found out, means they are my best layers. I think when Edna joins in she will be the same. Phoebe and Maggie are drawing it out over several weeks - which makes them my worst layers (and if I were being mercenary about it they are the ones to cull apparently) and Fliss and Belle are somewhere in between.
Chickens! There's always something.
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