We’ve let our chicken’s free range over the property since we’ve had them. But we came to realize the damage that chickens can cause. Not only do they destroy flower beds with their scratching, but they also get chicken dung on decks, pathways, and everywhere you don’t want it. Also, consider the daily egg hunt over five acres was a chore.
Additionally, last fall we had two of our hens disappear for a few weeks only to reappear later with a clutch of chicks. We had around 30 new chickens in two groups. Given the free-range nature of the hens, we were not able to get the chicks contained and over the subsequent month, we lost all but one of them. We figured that predators were partly to blame, but this seemed weird after the hens started bringing their chicks into the hen house at night.
We soon discovered that we had an owl that would come into the hen house at night and was probably getting the chicks (as well as a couple of our hens later in the fall). Check out this video here from our trail cam.
Learning item #1 – make sure to close the chickens in at night. It’s unfortunate that it took us so long to figure out what was going on.
With those factors in consideration, we decided to contain the chickens full time. While this restricts them somewhat we made sure space is large enough to give them room to move, get out of each other’s way (particularly the roosters) and still feel as if they are mostly free – they are still able to get outside and range the pen area. The benefit has been less hunting for eggs, less concern about broody hens in the brush, and cleaner property. The hens seem happy enough and egg production hasn’t changed.
When we bought the property there was an existing shed that had been made into a large hen house with an attached chicken yard. The chicken yard was small and not well designed to keep chickens contained. We tripled the size of the chicken yard and added a six-foot hex mesh fence to keep them contained. We kept several trees in the yard to give shelter and gave them some perch and escape locations.
Initially, all was good – but we noticed some of our smaller Road Island Red’s were escaping. We figured out they were able to fly over the six-foot fence. We ended up clipping wing feathers and haven’t had an escape since.