Providing Perches Inside a Chicken Coop

Chickens feel safer when they roost off the ground, particularly while they sleep at night. Providing perches inside a chicken coop reduces the temptation that they will sleep unsafely outdoors in a tree or along a fence top. Perches are also handy in the daytime for resting, preening, or escaping harassment by the more dominant flockmates.

Early Perching

Perching is a natural and healthy habit, and walking along perches, or hopping on and off them during the day is good entertainment. It is also good exercise that enhances muscle and bone development. Chickens that don’t have early access to perching have difficulty learning to roost as they mature.

In her book Locally Laid Lucie B. Amundsen describes how she and her husband Jason started their commercial pastured egg farm. The morning after their first pullets arrived, Jason discovered several dozen had died during the night.

Turns out the farm where the pullets were raised on contract had no roosts. So instead of roosting on the perches the Amundsens provided, the pullets piled on the floor, and those on the bottom smothered. Since the shelter’s design was based on vertical use of space, “It was like we built a high-rise apartment and everyone was racing to live in the ground-floor unit.”

A group of Swedish researchers wanted to find out why chickens denied early access to perches have difficulty roosting. They determined that such chickens lack cognitive spatial skills necessary for moving around in three-dimensional space. Furthermore, the effect is pronounced and long lasting. Chickens raised without perches may also incur low muscle strength, lack motor skills, and have poor balance.

Practice Perches

When light chicken breeds reach about 4 weeks of age and heavy breeds about 6 weeks, they start looking for places to roost. Low practice perches may be made of 3⁄4-inch-diameter wooden dowels or 1×2 lumber with the narrow edge turned upward and the edges rounded. Allow 4 inches of roosting space per chick. Make the total length of the perch no more than about 3 feet so it won’t sag under the weight of multiple birds.

Start the perches close to the floor and move them up as the majority of birds learn to use them. Better yet, as space permits, furnish perches of varying heights. Lighter breeds and game breeds tend to roost higher than heavier breeds. Chickens higher in the pecking order also prefer to perch higher than their subordinates. If you keep chickens and guinea fowl together, the guineas will invariably muscle their way up to the higher roosts.

Perch Construction

The circumference of a roosting bar for mature chickens should be no less than the length of a chicken’s foot, as measured from the end of the middle toe to the end of the hind toe when the foot is flat on the ground. You can make a roost from an old wooden ladder or anything else strong enough to hold chickens and rough enough for them to grip, but without being so splintery it injures their feet. Plastic pipe and metal pipe do not make good roosts; they’re too smooth for chickens to grasp firmly.

If you use new lumber, round off the corners so your chickens can comfortably wrap their toes around it. On our farm we use softwood 2-by-2s with the edges rounded off. Most hens prefer softwood over hardwood.

A good way to make sure all your birds find their comfortable roosting height is by providing a variety of perch heights, arranged like the steps of a ladder leaning against the wall. Offsetting the roosting bars has two advantages: birds that roost lower won’t get pooped on during the night by those on higher perches, and birds that don’t fly well or lack spatial skills can hop from one level to another until they reach their comfort zone.

A ladder design, as shown in the above photo, minimizes the amount of space used for perches. Some chicken keepers prefer to install a series of parallel perches all the same height to avoid squabbles over the top rung. But I find chickens work that out on their own, and each chicken occupies its own place like kids in a classroom sitting at the same desks every day.

Perch Spacing

Provide enough perching space so all your chickens have no trouble finding a place to roost. Allow a minimum of 8 inches for each light-breed chicken, or 10 inches for the larger breeds. Place roosts at least 18 inches from the nearest parallel wall.

Our lowest rung is about 18 inches off the ground, with succeeding bars spaced 12 inches apart both vertically and horizontally. The chickens can easily hop from rung to rung to get down from the highest perch. Where perches inside the chicken coop are all the same level, they should be no more than 3 feet off the floor to avoid leg and keel injuries from jumping down.

Providing suitable perches inside the chicken coop encourages the flock to roost safely indoors. Installing a pop-hole door that closes automatically is an additional safety measure to keep out night prowling predators.