Chicken Coop Designs

Portable chicken coop designs are perfect when you have just a few hens that you want to move around your yard. Also known as chicken tractors, these little coops have a small area for roosting, eating, drinking, laying eggs and foraging. Since the coop is moved every few days to a week, your chickens are getting plenty of grass and bugs to supplement their diet.

You may wonder why you would want a portable chicken coop design. Moving the chickens around keeps them safe and secure while giving them new foraging grounds. They can be moved about the yard to eat grass, bugs and add their droppings to your yard for fertilizer. You can even move some of them onto garden areas at the end of the season so your chickens can glean anything leftover from harvest. They will also fertilize your garden. The droppings will decompose over the winter, leaving your spring garden ready to grow more luscious produce for you the next season. You'd be surprised to find out that chickens that are not moved around can reduce an area down to bare earth in less than a week in many cases. After that, it becomes a muddy mess every time it rains, and your chickens don't get all that nutritious greenery to eat.

An easy chicken coop design that is portable is the ark. This is a triangular A-frame pen with the wide base at the bottom and the peak at the top. The ark can be made small or large. The only thing that should limit you for size is whether you can move it or not. The ark is made so a third of it is the coop and the other two-thirds is an outdoor run. The coop can hold perches and nest boxes. A small opening lets the chickens out into the run. A larger door on the opposite side of the coop lets you in to gather eggs, feed the birds and clean out the coop. The run also has a door at the end for your easy access. Arks can be moved by attaching long poles so two people can lift and move it, or they can be hooked up to a vehicle and towed.

Another A-frame type portable chicken coop design has the coop in the top third of the A-frame and the chicken run beneath it. The coop provides shade this way, and the chickens are able to sleep up off the ground in a protected area. Small doors at each end let you in to clean and gather eggs. These coops are generally built to house two to four hens and are moved by hand.

Small portable chicken coop designs can also be imaginative. Build one that is on wheels that can be moved around easily by a single person, or one that can be separated from a run for moving.

Portable runs can be made from wire and PVC. You can even use a dog house as the coop itself with a few modifications to make it easy to access for egg gathering and cleaning.