In researching designs for our future chicken pasture coop I came across a great collection of photos detailing the construction of what might be the sturdiest chicken coop ever built.

I really like it when a project can be broken down into a series of pictures, and Suburban Chicken.org did a great job documenting their new chicken palace.

They use that same level of detail to describe their varied flock of beautiful hens of which I seem to be partial to Mabel...the one in the bottom right hand corner. It's a good collection of data on various breeds, but I wonder how brutal the pecking order is in such a diverse crowd? The more experience I get with chickens the more I'm inclined to believe the old cliche "birds of a feather flock together" which is why we've decided to go with just one breed for the pasture experiment.

Is it cruel to segregate chickens is such a way? I guess I don't know the answer to that question, but when I see one chicken being a bully to another it tells me that the stress level is going up for that one bird which means its health and egg production might decline in direct relation.

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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.



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