Young hens don’t use coup

Thank you all for the tips. Tonight they all went in on their own. And thirty minutes later the automatic door closed. Everything went perfectly tonight.

The coup is fairly big inside. We took the plans for a coup for about a dozen and doubled it. They haven’t used the rooting bars yet. We also have a shelf. All together there is a floor, a shelf above. A roost bar above that and another row of roost bar above that.

Okay, so let's see if we can figure out your floor square footage.
In the plans from the link, the shelves are poop boards, which are incredibly useful, but it doesn't apply to the space for birds to move around.
They say the coop is 62" (5ft 2in) wide, but nest boxes don't count as floor space since the birds will only use them for laying.
The "Roosting Board Support" highlighted in yellow seems the best measure of floor space available here.
43 1/2" by 65 3/4"
is approximately 3 1/2 ft by 5 1/2 ft.
= 20 sq ft of floor space in the coop (if I can do math right)
With the minimum of 4 sq ft per adult chicken, the coop in the drawing would fit 5 hens.

So, did you say you doubled the dimensions?
If your coop came out at least 7x11, or more likely an 8x10, that would be large enough for 10 adult hens. 🙂
Do you know how your final measurements worked out?
I hope when you built it that poop board got raised up, because just over a foot between the board and the floor doesn't provide them much walking room underneath it with litter and all. Since you were building it bigger, moving that higher may have come naturally.



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ETA: Oops! 7x11 would be quadruple the square footage. Math is hard.
 
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