Roosting Bars

The chickens just hanging out together under the shade. There is a cherry tree behind the chicken coop and this gives a shade on this side of the chicken run. The one in the forefront is a dominant roo and he likes chasing all the girls around although he is only 7 months old. The runt in the group whom we thought to be a female turned out to be another roo and he likes to keep his distance from the dominant roo. Henrietta, the mother hen, likes to keep by herself as well because she is still moulting but the dominant roo still tries to mount her whenever he gets the chance. Henrietta is inside the coop when this pic was taken.   

The dominant roo is facing the steps that leads down to the pop door in the coop. There is a small rain water gutter at the bottom of the steps just before the pop door which prevents the water from getting inside the coop. Where the chickens are sitting on, that's not a roosting bar actually. Those are the top parts of the trees that we cut off and used as posts in the chicken run which is why they are thinner. We tied them together and used them to keep the river sand inside the chicken run. It's just that the chickens likes to sit on these dividers. The low roost is just beside them and they use that too. 

These are the high roosting bars in the chicken run at 5 feet high. They like to use these high roost specially in the early morning. It gives them the space to run to when one of them is being chased. There are two of these high roosting bars and two of the lower roosting bars. The size of the chicken run is only 6 feet wide by 10 feet long which is just right for their number since there are only 6 of them.

The chicken run with the chickens up high on the roosting bars.

Litter in the Coop

This is the chicken coop with the door open. The bottom of the front wall about 1/4 of it is covered with scrap tin materials over a concrete base. The rest of the upper wall is made of 1 x 1 inch wire mesh material so it is very airy inside and this serves as the coop's ventilation. 

This pic is inside the coop with wood chips as litter over the concrete floor.

We use wood chips as litter on the floor inside the chicken coop which we sourced out from a furniture shop along the National Highway in La Trinidad Benguet. The owner is giving these away for free as long as we do the bagging ourselves because his workers were busy with their own work. He said that we just missed some people who were there ahead of us to get some wood chips since they too are using it as litter in their pigsty. So I bought three empty feed sacks from across the street and filled these up with the wood chips. Luckily for me, my young nephew Jim was with me so he helped me in bagging the wood chips. The only expense we made was for the cost of the 3 feed sacks at 12 pesos each or a total of 36 pesos and the expense for the taxi which amounted to 60 pesos from La Trinidad Benguet to our house in Baguio City.

When we arrived home, we spread out the wood chips over the concrete floor inside the chicken coop. The three sacks of wood chips just about covered the whole floor at 2-inches deep. I wish I had taken more wood chips but then again, the ones that we did not bag were really more of a saw dust and I read on the Internet that this is not good for the chicken's lungs which is why we did not bag all of them. We have been getting a lot of rains lately because this is the rainy season now in the Philippines and the litter was getting damp. However, it's been sunny for the past two days and the litter on the floor dried up fast. This is what I like about wood chips, it's capacity to dry up fast. Anyway, I will have to get more wood chips to top off the litter because it looks like it could use another inch or two. To make the wood chips friable, we throw cracked corn on the floor and the chickens love to scratch and this loosens up the wood chips on the floor. I read somewhere that some people use Diatomatous Earth or DM over the litter in the coop but I am not sure if we have that here in the Philippines. I'll have to ask around the agricultural shops if they carry this product.

Waterer

This blue drinking bowl was our first waterer for the chickens. It has a wide base at the bottom so the chickens could not tip it over. It's just that we have to change the water several times a day because it gets dirty.

Then we switched to this one-gallon waterer that we bought in a farm supply store and things improved a little bit but the water still gets dirty.

This is now the latest drinking waterer for the chickens inside the coop. It has a dual nipple so two chickens can take a drink at the same time.  

When I was looking for some water bottles for the rabbits in the pet shop store one day, I found this dual nipple on the shelf which is actually for pet dogs and I thought that I could probably use it for the chickens. So I bought this item and got an empty 1-litter plastic soda bottle and tried to cap it on but it would not fit. So my husband and I went to the grocery store looking for a plastic soda bottle with a wider mouth that would fit into this contraption. We bought different kinds of bottled juice in different sizes and containers with a wider mouth thinking that any of these should fit. Nothing worked. Then I saw an empty 1.5 litter plastic bottle in the trash can in our backyard and thought I'd give this a try and it fit perfectly! The chickens didn't know what to make of this new waterer at first so we put the old one next to it. Out of curiosity perhaps, they started to peck on the nipples and water would come out and then we took out the old waterer and they have been using this new one since then.