Build an inexpensive, portable and predator-proof chicken house – do-it-yourself – mother nature news

July 6, 2017 | Filed in: Free DIY Chicken Coop Designs.

Mobile Chicken Coop

A transportable coop enables you to definitely move your chickens to new “pasture” daily. In contrast to industrial eggs, eggs from hens permitted to give on pasture contain four occasions more vitamin D, three occasions more e vitamin and 7 occasions more beta carotene.


Among the greatest challenges to keep chickens is working out building a chicken house and pen that will permit your wild birds to forage whilst keeping them protected from predators. Letting the wild birds roam and have a diverse diet leads to eggs and meat with terrific flavor and diet. The down-side of allowing chickens to free-range is the fact that predators will more often than not uncover your flock and kill some wild birds. Many times you lose only one bird other occasions you’ll experience heavy losses in only one attack. Even just in cities, foxes, raccoons and hawks can kill your chickens, and roaming dogs can generate problems in urban and rural areas.

Portable chicken coops (also known as “pasture pens”) make the perfect solution, particularly if you keep merely a couple of hens. You can preserve your wild birds in the movable chicken house which has a wide open bottom therefore the wild birds can feast upon grass and insects. Every day, slowly move the pen onto a brand new portion of your lawn, garden or pasture. Whenever you’re working outdoors as well as your presence will deter predators, you are able to enable your wild birds from the coop to range. They’ll naturally go back to the coop in the evening to roost, or, if you want to have them inside before dusk, it is simple to train these to encounter the coop by providing them treats.

For quite some time, Mother Nature NEWS has worked to build up affordable chicken house plans for those who wish to keep only a couple of hens or raise a couple of meat wild birds. Our goal is a small, secure, low-cost, DIY, portable chicken house to be used in gardens and backyards. We would have liked a coop that will permit the wild birds to forage on pasture or fertilize garden beds while still keeping them protected from predators. The lightweight, affordable, wire-mesh pens we authored about within the 2007 Portable Chicken Small-Coop Plan were working well until we discovered a sizable dog could smash an unreinforced wire unit and get rid of the hens inside. These ultra-lightweight pens still work great in the fenced garden or yard where dogs can’t reach them, however for a coop to make use of in unfenced areas, we’ve developed the raised design proven above, featuring a steel frame to aid the wire mesh. The coop continues to be portable, however the frame causes it to be a lot more predator-proof. We’re calling it MOTHER’s Mighty Chicken-Mobile, also it’s meant to house 3 to 4 hens. Night time shelter within the coop could be a lightweight plastic storage tub, a doghouse or perhaps a “room” produced from corrugated plastic. (To determine an animation of methods the coop all comes together, see the video at left within the “Related Content” box. To see the recording entirely screen, click the second icon in the right at the end from the video box.)

Building MOTHER’s Mighty Chicken-Mobile

To help make the steel frame, our DIY guru, Nathan Lindsey, first welded three 2-feet-by-3-feet rectangles from square steel tubing. Next, he welded 10-feet lengths of position iron towards the rectangles, giving us a coop frame 10 ft lengthy, 3 ft wide and a pair of ft high. One individual can move this 3-by-10-feet unit, and it’ll fit nicely over most garden beds as well as in a few of the wider pathways inside your garden. Nathan used 1-inch position iron, but three-quarter-inch material will make the coop a little lighter and simpler to maneuver.


Making A Raccoon Proof Chicken Coop


PIZZA-MAN-3256: Troy you say the raccoons are smart,,After watching this we all know they are lot smarter than you are…﻿

extractdigit: Troy, raccoons will reach right thru that wire and grab the chickens. They can kill them thru the fencing and partially eat them that way. It's happened to me. You need hardware cloth wire with smaller holes. Also, safety glasses for Chris?﻿

The Do It Yourself World: +extractdigit Yes I am going to put hardware cloth on the bottom﻿

The Long Project: Troy that coop looks no where near raccoon proof. =/ Build them a proper shelter that you can lock them up at night. Maybe a chicken house built like your sugar shack. Put a door on it and pen them up at night inside a predator proof 'house'.﻿

squirrelbong A: man if yer gonna show 10 straight minutes of stapling and noisy generator…please use an extension cord and move the generator further away next time, it makes the video more watchable.\nWhy not just build something bigger like a small shack for them to live in? I mean you've built several of these now and they're always really small. Imagine how nice it would be to be able to just open a real sized door and WALK into the whole chicken coop/tractor and collect the eggs or feed or water them. It's like you're building it on a chicken sized scale instead of a human sized scale ya know? It definitely would benefit the chickens and YOU to just bite the bullet and make it a human accessible shack rather then a glorified cage. You do your thing though bud, it's all about progress. I know how hard it can be to switch directions once you get a project started…ppl don't want to feel like they've wasted any work/time.\n*keep in mind that those square holes in that wire fencing will be stretched and pulled on by the animals and become round, making much larger openings….I would guess they equal about a 4" diameter hole each, once stretched. Now think about it…would you build a coop with 4" round holes in it? of course not. \nsry, I'm only trying to help, by pointing out things you *may have not yet considered.﻿

The Do It Yourself World: +squirrelbong A Thanks.﻿

wayne blades: predators will have a ball with your chickens with the wire you are putting in the run.\nThey will reach in through the wire , you will see. \n You should use hardware cloth﻿

mary cassidy: +wayne blades– he has already had that happen in a earlier video… was that coop that looks like a roof..﻿

The Do It Yourself World: +wayne blades I will﻿

Nortekj: That welded wire is a poor choice to keep critters out, it will fail at the welds allowing the animals an entrance to the containment. The animals will bite  and pull across two uprights or cross  wires, the welds will fail and then there will be enough give between the wires for them to enter, Also I have had raccoons, oppossums and foxes to grab the chickens and actually pull them through the 2 x 3 inch opening of the wire.﻿

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