More Chicken Coop Details

I took some more pictures of the movable pen that Kevin made so you could see a few details that weren't finished when I posted about it. We put flight netting over the top and added a pole so that we could walk around in it. Zip ties made the whole thing very quick to assemble. There is not a nail or screw anywhere in the pen. We were going to make it 6' tall but changed it to 4' to accommodate the fencing we had left over from a previous project. Every time I go in there to put feed in the feeders I wished we had gone with the 6' because I usually have my hair up in a clip and it invariably gets snagged in the netting as I am walking bent over. Nice!



I slid a shovel through the fencing to make a fat perch so that Missy, our little handicapped poult, could roost. Her foot was injured, I think from big, fat Flipper stepping on her from when she was tiny and in the pen with him. We kept two poults in with Flipper for company when he hatched so he wouldn't get lonely. Now they are inseparable. Her foot has gotten better and she can perch normally although she has a funny rolling gate and cannot run very fast.



Buddy is attached to the little chicks that were in with him too. When the chicks roost at night Buddy sleeps right below them as close as he can get cause he cannot get up on the roost to be next to them.

Here is a closeup of the gate detail. Kevin used a chain link fence gate hinge for the door. He had to modify it a little cause the plastic pipe was too large.

The top hinge, pretty handy huh.

At work we got something delivered in this huge wooden box so I asked if I could have it and we brought it home. It made a find little chicken house. My attempt at making a ramp is a little rickety but it worked. Flipper looks like a goose now. He is only seven and a half weeks old. Amazingly the turkeys that are older than him are small in comparison. I feel guilty saying this but if you wanted a bird strictly for meat an Ebdon goose would be it. They grow so fast and eat tons of grass and weeds and would need minimal feed once they were a few months old. I guess they reach mature size at like three or four monthe old. (Sorry Flipper and Buddy for saying that)

Speaking of turkeys, here they are and boy do we have a problem. We do not want to put them in with the older birds yet so we have left them roaming the yard close to the house so we could keep an eye on them. (We have a Coopers Hawk that visits our pond looking for frogs. I got to see him swoop down and catch one a couple weeks ago, really cool!) But then the turkeys discovered that the deck rail is a really nice place to roost. Well you can imagine! Eight turkeys walking all over the table and lots and lots of mess under the rail so now they have a little fenced area off by themselves. I loved watching them run all over the yard though. They looked like the dinosaurs on Jurassic Park.

See ya next time,

Beth