New Home for Chicken Project

Guan Ai students have been raising chickens for half a year. You can read the history of this project here: [Part 1] [Part 2] [Part 3]. For the first several months of their lives, the Guan Ai chickens have been kept in a cage to protect them from predators. Now that they are large enough to protect themselves, some villagers helped us build a chicken run so that they can run around outside. Students designed and built some parts of the new coop, such as the door and the nests. In the weeks that followed, students noticed some weaknesses in the original design and have made a number of modifications. For example, the bottom of the netting was originally held down by bricks, but the bricks often shifted around because many students crowd about the chicken coop during break times. Therefore, the students dug a trench, pinned the netting down with bricks inside the trench, and then covered it back up with dirt. The students originally used wooden boards covered with hay as the flooring of the nests. They observed that the hens scratched at the bottom for a long time and tried to surround themselves with hay using their beaks. They deduced that hens like to lay eggs in a deep bed of hay, and replaced the boards with basins and baskets.