Thursday, September 27, 2007

Chicken Run

We were dead pleased with ourselves last weekend. We spent hours constructing a massive chicken enclosure so that our three feathery ladies can be free range, but not destroy the 'human' bit of the garden.

We hammered in fence posts, went crazy with the chicken wire, and felt confident that it was escape proof.

Not so.

Nick went out last night to lock them safely away from the foxes and discovered Scramble and Margo had gone to roost on top of their house, instead of inside on their perches. They had escaped the confines of the run, then been unable to figure out how to get back in at bed time. Omelet was safely asleep inside like a good hen.

They looked so forlorn, squashed up together, trying to get as close to their normal roosting spot as possible. When chickens are roosting it's really easy to pick them up, so we had no trouble lifting them down and putting them safely inside. The punishment for escapeeism is the loss of their large ranging enclosure until Saturday and we can discover where the defences were breached. Until then they will just have to make do in the smaller caged run. Naughty girls.

4 Comments:

Blogger Primrose Hill said...

think you might need to clip their wings, but just on one side remember!

L x

7:58 AM  
Blogger Jane said...

We have one maran chicken who will not sleep in the chicken house unless it is really cold - she is called Peblo and is the sole survivor of the fox attack of 2006.
She can fly very well and that is what allowed her to survive when the fox got the rest of our chickens one afternoon. We don't know where she roosts - I suspect it is up in a leyandii tree on the boundary.
I used to worry about her but now I think it would be a lot worse for her if we clipped her wings or kept her caged. She is obviously perfectly happy.
She poddles about with the others until about 5pm and them disappears - greeting me at the back door first thing in the morning.
J
x

8:03 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

we've raised the height of the fence slightly, and that has contained the girls for two days. If they can still fly out we'll clip their wings.

9:24 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

still no fugative chickens...

9:12 AM  

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