Moving (the chickens) Out
August 7, 2025
Moving (The Chickens) Out
All three of our chicken groups started in the parakeet aviary which doubles as the fowl nursery. It is secure with a double door entrance, has a rustic, insulated shelter for the chicks which closes to keep in body heat, and plenty of room to learn to forage through leaves, greens, etc.
Then they start to fly and perch on the parakeet branches!
Poor parakeets are like “Help! Get these intruders back below us!” After all, when you are one-fifth the size of bigger birds yet you control the skies, you race down and scare them all thinking it is great fun (said parakeet in the foreground) but when they start moving into your upstairs apartment space, you are totally screaming all day to get them out.
So, they move out in the dark of the night to the chicken enclosure, which for now is mobile chicken wire over cattle panels wrapped together to include odd angles around trees we want to keep and covering ground we want them to decimate the weeds and vines out of.
We move the chickens out of the nursery between 6 and 8 weeks old. Since the bigger flock can hear them, introducing all “teenager” chickens to the big flock at night by just putting them in the nighttime enclosure after the others are roosting has worked fine. Our last batch of teenagers moved out this past week. Now we are ready for another batch of baby chicks!
Their little roost at night and egg laying spot is a shelter built over a pallet with added slats so the floor has some narrow openings for debris to fall through and ventilation (paramount in Florida summers). It is heavy duty but small enough I can tip it and easily rotate move (I will eventually add little wheels on one side so I can tilt and roll).
This little setup has seen our first rooster crow (at an astounding 42 days!! – I’d never heard a rooster crow that young before!) and last week, our first little brown egg laid gently in a pine-shaving and dried grass bed mama hen lined with duck and chicken feathers.
I’m so thankful for the time I’ve spent with my littles building bits of the coop, duck test pond (to see how we could handle duck water – which is an amazing garden fertilizer), cutting posts for the yard, zip tying chicken wire to cattle panels, moving this setup a few times for the chickens and ducks to raze the land, and just sit on upside down buckets watching the little flock. Laud loves how soft the ducks are. Jillian is friends with every chicken. Lucas and Laud love my drill. Laud loves every tool – we have to keep them in our hands while he’s helping. But then I remember Lucas and tools building the guinea pig and chicken runs when he was two-years-old. I am so thankful for our fun little farm and extra time this week to work on yard projects!
Thank you for reading!
Type at you later!
~Nancy Tart
