Chickens climb a tall ramp

Chicken ramps have varying
success as a way to get the flock to a higher location without making
them fly.  One of our customers wrote in last summer with the tale
of an eight foot
long, three foot tall ramp over her fence that her chickens simply
would not learn to use.  So I was a bit leery of the tall, long
ramp in my
brother’s coop design.



I shouldn’t have doubted
Joey’s ingenuity.  He added very nice stepping boards to give the
chickens traction, then trained them to walk up the ramp following a
trail of laying pellets.



The only downside of Joey’s
coop appears to be something none of us expected.  The chickens go
in the top door and they go in the bottom door, but they don’t use the
intervening perches to travel between levels.  I suspect the coop
simply isn’t wide enough to make them feel safe spreading their wings,
and chickens do like to add stability with a bit of wing action when
making large hops.  Joey’s got a solution there too — he says he
may add a floor for the upper level and simply turn the high rise coop
into two apartments.