Tips for Protecting Your Chickens
If you have chickens in a rural area and potentially even in a city, you need to take steps to protect them from predators, and the right fencing can be essential in this process. Take a look at these tips.
Surround the Area With Wire Fencing
So that your chickens can feast on grubs, bugs and worms, they need a yard where they can mill around. Ideally, you should surround this area with wire fencing. Remember, while chickens can't fly far distances, they can fly a bit, and you need to ensure the wire fencing is high enough to keep them in.
On top of that, you also have to think about threats that might be able to slip through your fence. For example, if you think a small fox could fit through the holes in your wire fencing, you may want to cover it with mesh.
Dig Some Fencing Into the Ground
The fence is just the first step. Some of the biggest threats to your chickens, such as foxes and marsupial moles, may burrow their way into your chicken yard. To stop them, you need to dig a relatively deep trench around the outside of your fence. Then, you need to insert wiring fencing or mesh into that trench and fill the surrounding area with dirt to stabilise the fencing. You can find fencing supplies from companies that focus on industrial and manufacturing products.
Don't Forget Flying Threats
Chickens are tasty, and even if you're keeping your chickens for their eggs, the birds flying over heard are likely to see a tasty dinner down below. To protect your chickens from attacks by their fellow birds such as eagles or hawks, you may want to cover the top of your chicken yard.
For this part of the job, you just need flexible wire mesh. If you stretch that across your chicken yard and secure it into place with zip ties, your chickens should be fine.
Explore Other Protective Strategies
In addition to having the right fencing in place, you may want to take other steps to protect your flock. In particular, feral cats, foxes, dingoes and many other predators are scared of people. To create the sense that there are people in the area, you may want to buy an inexpensive battery-operated radio and have that playing in your chicken coop during the day.
You may even want to put up cameras to monitor your chickens. A game camera or a security camera that turns on when there's movement can help to monitor the area at night when your chickens are sleeping. Then, based on the threats picked up by the camera, you can improve your fencing strategy as needed.