A good chicken coop nesting box doesn’t need to be complicated

We’ve spoken before about the importance of chicken coop nesting boxes. The chicken coop nesting box is where your chickens go to lay their eggs.

As eggs are one of the primary reasons for keeping chickens you need to make sure that they have somewhere comfortable and convenient to lay.

A nesting box doesn’t need to be complicated. In our experience it also doesn’t need to be large. A box which is sufficiently big to house one chicken is preferable because if it is much bigger you will find them trying to lay in the same box together at the same time.

There are all sorts of ways to get a nesting box in your chicken coop. Here’s a couple of videos showing you some of the options.

Video number 2, showing you what happens when more than one chicken try and lay in the same nesting box.

Get started making your own chicken coop nesting box.

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What do nesting boxes in chicken coops actually do, and how big should they be?

We’ve recently been asked about chicken nesting boxes. What nesting boxes are, what place that they have in the chicken coop and how big they should be.

So let’s look at chicken nesting boxes for a moment. As the name suggests nesting boxes are for your chooks to nest in. This means that that is the place where they will lay their eggs, and if you leave the eggs there for them to do so they will sit on them in the hope of hatching some chicks.

Of course the likelihood of chicks hatching depends on whether or not you have a rooster. But the chooks don’t know that and they will happily sit on unfertilised eggs if you leave them in the nesting box to build up.

In our view the prime purpose of the nesting box is to give the chicken somewhere that is relatively dark. They seem to prefer nesting in dark places. They can be fussy about where they nest and we find on occasions that they will often nest in some 44 gallon drums that we have outside the chicken coop instead.

Our nesting boxes in the chicken coop that we built have a removable lid. If we leave the lid off some of the boxes they will all try to nest in the box with the lid on.

We also suspect that they prefer nesting boxes that are not only relatively dark but are also quite small. A box that is not much larger than chicken is probably ideal, and if you make it much bigger you will often find that there is another chook in the box trying to lay her egg there as well.

About the most important consideration for nesting boxes is that they be easy to clean, so make sure they have some form of removable lid so that you can lift the lid to clean the box. Read the rest of this entry