Ornery, free range chickens
Unless
you have opposable thumbs, it's a long, long way from Mark's new
automatic chicken coop door (labeled pophole) to our trailer. We
can cut through the pastures, but a chicken has a choice of two
exhausting options. They can turn left outside the pophole and
skirt the pasture fence for quite a ways, then bushwhack through briars
and climb up the steep incline to the plateau that houses our
homestead. Or they can turn right outside the pophole and follow
the gentler slope of the driveway, traveling perhaps a tenth of a mile
around the barn and into our farm proper.
When our
australorps started slipping under the gate and exploring the floodplain a couple of months ago, I
was a bit concerned that they would make one of these treks and find
our delicious garden fruits and enticing mulch. But I soon set my
fears to rest --- even when I walked Lucy through our free ranging
flock, the chickens stopped following me at the end of the pasture
fence and headed back to the woods closer to the coop to look for
easier pickings.
I'd been considering opening
a pophole directly into the floodplain so that the old girls could join
these youngsters on their free range jaunts, but I was a bit concerned
that an unfenced door into a chicken coop at the furthest limits of
Lucy's usual patrols would be too much for predators to resist. Jeremy's
automatic chicken door
seemed like the answer --- I could let the chickens out to eat all that
good food in the floodplain without worrying about predators. So
as soon as Mark had the door in place, I opened it up and called our
chickens to explore.
Less than an hour later,
our ornery old hens were eating raspberries in our front yard.
The good news is that the australorps didn't follow, so there's still a
chance that my plan to let the chickens free range in the floodplain
will work once we delete the old girls from the flock. But, for
now, the pophole is shut and everyone is relegated to the
pasture. I wonder if those few raspberries were worth such an
arduous journey?
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About us: Anna Hess and Mark Hamilton spent over a decade living self-sufficiently in the mountains of Virginia before moving north to start over from scratch in the foothills of Ohio. They've experimented with permaculture, no-till gardening, trailersteading, home-based microbusinesses and much more, writing about their adventures in both blogs and books.
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