Under construction

Three weeks old must be chicken adolescence. Our birds are mangy-looking, with clumps of chick fuzz on their as-yet-unfeathered necks and heads, and their first awkward attempts at flight have them falling all over each other. I know chickens can’t have acne and prom anxiety, but I can readily imagine it.

Size-wise, they’re too big for the brooder but too small for the coop, and so we had to rig up tweener housing for them. Since they’re only going to be in it for six weeks we didn’t want to call in the Toll Brothers, and we went scavenging to see whether we couldn’t house them without incurring yet another expense that their eggs would eventually be called on to offset.

The teen hang-out

The dumpster behind our local equipment rental place supplied the crate that became the frame. The construction pile at the dump yielded plywood for the floor, and the metal pile had a couple of screens for the top. There was some old chicken wire behind our garage that fit the crate, if not perfectly, well enough. We also found some vertical blind slats at the dump, and we attached them around the bottom of the cage to keep the birds from scratching all their bedding out through the wire. The roost bar is a stick.

It’s not pretty, but it’s serviceable housing that will last them until they come into their majority and move to the coop. Meantime, though, they are not borrowing the car keys.

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