Make your chicken house safe or a fox will take your chooks
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Unfortunately life for a chook can be a little dangerous. There are plenty of predators that are happy to eat a tasty chicken including foxes and wild and domestic dogs. And cats. And more.
So when you’re building or buying a chicken house how do you make it safe for your chooks?
There’s a few things to think about. The first is the height of the fence surrounding the chicken house, assuming that your chickens are allowed out of their house during the day to roam outdoors.
In our experience chooks can fly reasonably high. At a guess a chook can clear a fence that would be 5 feet high. Of course it depends on the individual chicken.
You can attempt to limit their ability to fly by clipping their wings however in our experience this is successful only occasionally. We have had chooks with 2 wings clipped that can still fly to some height.
Therefore if you are seeking to keep your chooks within the run all this day you should make the surrounding fence at least 6 feet high.
Having said that the fence around our chicken run is no higher than 3 feet, and we can step over it comfortably. Some of our chickens fly over each day and free range around the garden and although we live in the country and have plenty of foxes we have never lost a chook to a fox.
Provided you always ensure they are back in the chicken house at night. And you need to check, because they will return 99 percent of the time but 1 percent of the time they will not.
It’s also worth knowing that unless you protect the fence around the chicken run a fox will dig underneath it. Foxes will always dig rather than jump. Although as noted our fence would be no barrier to a fox who wanted to jump over it we have never had a fox in the chicken yard in more than 10 years of keeping chooks.
But you must protect your fence from digging foxes. You do this by digging about 6 inches of the chicken wire into the ground, folding it horizontally outwards from the base of the fence and covering it with soil so that once the fox starts to dig he will encounter chicken wire and be forced to stop. Read the rest of this entry
