nest boxes

Unless you want to be looking around everywhere for your eggs, including nest boxes in your plans for chicken coops is an excellent idea. You’ll find some designs – like small portable chicken tractors – often have them already built in, but others leave the choice up to you, or give various options. Following these tips should help you decide which are best for you.

What you want is a sheltered area that your chicken are comfortable to lay in. By sheltered that means even inside a chicken coop it should be a separate boxed off area, shaded if possible to make it darker and again, if possible, away from roosting perches – you don’t actually want the hens to sleep in there because they’ll likely make a mess. 12 inches square is a good size – so your birds can actually stand up if they want to. Bigger is better if you’ve got the space.

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When people are looking for good plans for chicken coops, one of the things that comes up is nest boxes. That’s not somewhere for your chickens to sleep – they’ll be perfectly happy roosting on a perch – it’s somewhere convenient for them to lay their eggs. Chicken will lay eggs just about anywhere though, so do you need nest boxes to be part of your chicken coop design or not?

Let’s look at things from the chicken’s point of view. She’s not laying eggs for you at all –  she’s laying eggs to make more chickens! If you don’t take the eggs away, she’ll sit on them and try to hatch them. She’ll stop laying completely. So from her point of view she wants somewhere where she thinks the eggs will be protected – hidden from predators – and warm.

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