So much to do and so little time. One of the bright spots for last year was the addition of seven chickens to our original flock of three. Our first year with chickens was a learning experience. We allowed the original three to free range our property and soon found out that a full grown chicken can cause a lot of damage to tender young crops not to mention that chicken shit was EVERYWHERE. The other thing we learned was that hawks LOVE chicken as much as we do!
After the loss of dear Waddle (may she rest in peace) our two remaining birds looked so awfully pathetic that we ordered seven more that were delivered last May. Now this is a bone of contention between the wife and me because our town bylaws allow us to have ten chickens. To this day I don’t understand why she only ordered seven, not eight. But there you have it, we have a flock of nine hens.
To house our larger flock I built an expansion to our original playhouse coop (see category chickens for details). By July our chicks had grown to pullets and we needed to transition them from the watermelon box in the garage to the new coop. Now nine free ranging chickens would wreak havoc on our greenery so, in addition to our coop expansion, we needed to build a chicken run. I put up a temporary run made from landscape stakes and plastic netting which worked to keep the chickens confined. In the meantime, I began to build the permanent run. I dug the post holes and planted pressure treated 4x4s in them along with a little quickset morter. The dear wife helped me with thepoultry netting which we were able to source from Lowes. So far so good.
Because the poultry netting was 48″ wide, it required us to make an upper and lower pass around the sides of run which we then “sewed” together with wire. As I was finishing up the back side of the run, the chickens merrily scratching away, a hawk swooped out of the trees, flew right over my shoulder and landed in the run. A short chase ensued whereupon one of our Wyandotte’s was lifted into the air. Luckily, she proved too heavy for the hawk to fly off with and was summarily dropped when I finally found myself in the run kicking at the hawk. The hawk, acting completely nonplussed, flew to the top of the coop and glared at me with disdain, finally flying off after about 30 minutes. Needless to say, it was right back to Lowes for more poultry netting to cover then run.
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