Everything a first flock needs, in the order you buy it

Almost every backyard chicken supply list you will find is organized by category: feeders here, coops there, health supplies in a third list. That is a useful shape for a catalog and a useless shape for a person who has just ordered six chicks for a date three weeks away. What you need to know is not what exists. It is what has to be in the house before the box arrives, what can wait a month, and what you should not buy at all until you know how the birds turn out.

So this site is organized by stage, and this page is the map of all of them. Each stage is a hub, each hub is a point on the timeline, and the header nav runs left to right in the order you hit them.

The five stages, and what each one costs you

The whole first year of chicken keeping is four purchases and one ongoing one. Everything else is a refinement of those.

The single most common sequencing mistake is buying the coop first, because it is the exciting purchase. It is also the one you have the most time to get right — chicks do not go outside until they are fully feathered at around six weeks, so you have well over a month after they arrive to order and build it. Meanwhile the brooder gear has to be set up and warmed through before the box arrives, because day-old chicks cannot wait while you drive to a farm store.

Where the money actually goes

The cost of a first flock is front-loaded and lumpy: a coop is the large one-time expense, and everything after it is small and recurring. What surprises people is the running cost of the brooder, because it is invisible until the electricity bill arrives — and it is entirely determined by which heat source you pick.

How many birds, and how much space they need

Flock size decides coop size, and coop size decides most of the budget, so it is the first real decision. Chickens are social and three is the practical floor; six is the number most suburban keepers land on, because it survives losing one and it still fits a garden.

The space figures are published and you should hold makers to them. For laying hens, poultry.extension.org publishes 3 to 4 square feet per hen indoors and 10 square feet outdoors. Oregon State University Extension publishes at least 3 square feet per bird where there is run access, rising to 8 to 10 square feet where there is not. University of Maryland Extension publishes 6 to 10 inches of perch space per bird and one nest box for every four to five birds.

Those numbers matter because coop capacity claims routinely do not survive them. A popular six-hen plastic coop publishes an interior of 34 by 33 inches, which is 7.79 square feet, which is 1.30 square feet a bird — around a third of the extension figure. That is not necessarily a scandal, because the design assumes a permanently open attached run and the birds are only inside to sleep. But it does mean the coop you buy for six birds houses four if they are ever shut in, and nobody selling it is going to tell you that. Doing the division yourself is the whole point of the coop size page.

What not to buy in the first month

A short list, because the money saved here pays for better versions of the things that matter:

• A heat lamp. It costs twenty times as much to run, and the failure mode is a coop fire. See the head-to-head.
• Chicken wire. It keeps chickens in and keeps nothing out. Half-inch hardware cloth is the material, and predator-proofing explains why.
• A coop heater. Adult birds in a dry, ventilated coop do not need one, and a flock that has come to rely on heat is in real danger the night the power fails.
• Oyster shell, on day one. It is a laying supplement. Feeding calcium to growing birds is worse than not feeding it.