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Home Home and Family Pets Keeping Chickens Safe While They Sleep
Keeping Chickens Safe While They Sleep PDF Print E-mail
Written by Howard Kingsley   
Chickens are very curious animals; they love to scratch around for food especially at night. Before roosting they go for one more try at looking for something to eat among the assortment of items on the yard. For this reason they are prone to fall victims to predators that are just waiting for them to get careless. This is made worse by the fact that chickens cannot see well in the dark. Chicken farmers must therefore take every precaution to ensure their flocks' safety at night. There are a lot of things that you can do to protect your chickens while they are sleeping and below are some of them.
by HowardKingsley


Chickens are very curious animals; they love to scratch around for food especially at night. Before roosting they go for one more try at looking for something to eat among the assortment of items on the yard. For this reason they are prone to fall victims to predators that are just waiting for them to get careless. This is made worse by the fact that chickens cannot see well in the dark. Chicken farmers must therefore take every precaution to ensure their flocks' safety at night. There are a lot of things that you can do to protect your chickens while they are sleeping and below are some of them.

To keep them from predators, provide roosting bars for your chickens. They should be higher up from the ground and at least 25mm wide. Make them in the same size to prevent the chickens from competing against each other for the higher bar. This will allow the birds to perch on top of the bar when they are ready to sleep. Predators will find it hard to get to them because of the height and the bar's structure.

These roosting bars should be made as smooth as possible and to let the chickens grip on it well, it must not be round. If you cannot provide them with roosting bars, you can let them perch on trees but this is very dangerous because predators can get to them easily this way.

There should be trays under the roosting bars to collect the chickens' droppings in the morning. Chickens get rid of poop at night so to lessen the mess; there must be something to catch it. This makes cleaning of the coop easy and convenient for you.

Once the chickens go to sleep, they cannot be bothered until they are ready to wake up in the morning. Predators tend to attack during this time since the chickens are at their most vulnerable with their impaired vision and the need to sleep. Lock the coop when all of the chickens are inside but be sure to open the coop early so that they won't compete against each other in getting out.

Ensure proper ventilation of the coop to let air in but be very careful too that the flock is not exposed to too much draft which can cause illness.

In the morning you will find that your chickens are livelier when they have slept well and this will make them more productive too.

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Read more interesting tips on buying the best chicken coops at chicken coop blog today.

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