That's just what I did! It's worked great - I can pull them out easily when cleaning, or to discourage roosting in the summer when they go in that coop (inside the barn) to lay but I want them to overnight in an outside coop.
I think it must make a big difference what quality of paper is shredded and what shape the shreds are. I shred mostly corrugated cardboard plus a good amount of newspaper and grocery cardboard (cereal & pasta boxes etc.) using a heavy duty office “micro cut” crosscut shredder. As I believe I...
Cats can be so different one to the other. Some years ago one of my cats, then a young adult, got in amongst the pigeons and though when I found him he was leaving them alone, I also found one female huddled in a corner with a laceration under each wing. But the fact she was still alive (and...
That's funny, mine goes the other way: I would have 5 males and 1 female if another female that was released nearby hadn't decided to move in rather than fly home. (That was in the post I made last fall about the falconer I spotted in the field across the road from my house.)
I've figured out...
A lot of us here feel that a renovated shed makes the best coop, so you are way ahead of the game! (Me, I think a shed is the 2nd best, after a coop inside a barn like mine, since that makes it much more pleasant to deal with in cold/bad weather. 😂) @springvalley123 makes good points but they...
I’m afraid I really can’t say, since it is surrounded by hardware cloth and packed down pretty well by human feet as I tend to them. They do not scratch as chickens do.
I will say that people using it in horse stalls are all over the place, reporting it to be anything from dust free to very...
If used straight out of the bag as many seem to do, it does take a lot of bags to make a thick layer.
However, made into sawdust as above, they fluff up amazingly, so a half inch layer of pellets may be 2 inches deep sawdust.
In my pigeon aviary I use two bags to cover 6’x16’ (96sf)...
If you do it when the weather is dry, you won’t even notice the moisture, and it should dry out completely soon enough.
And I find it is much easier to clean as sawdust than as pellets because the sawdust will filter through any sort of sifter. Of course that is more true in the cat boxes than...
Yes, I do not like the texture straight out of the bag in a thin layer. However, I get around this by breaking it down to sawdust by slightly moistening it. For my 6’x16’ pigeon aviary I put down 2 bags which is a very thin layer but when I spray it with the garden hose and let it sit it fluffs...
It is sporadically active. I think there are several of us who get notifications (or notice in the forum listing) when there are new posts, and a few of us who will pop in with news about the pigeons in our lives.
It depends on what you're concerned about. I don't think I've ever seen the birds get zapped on mine and I'm not sure electrifying it is at all necessary to keep them in — I think it looks pretty solid to them.
However, electrifying it will make a big difference in keeping out predators...
I definitely see some paper caught in my knives after shredding newspaper, but I pull the worst off right away (it tends to build up primarily at one end) and I assume the rest gets cleared off by the cardboard I shred because it doesn’t seem to stick around.
(As I have mentioned in earlier...
I think I would probably try to convert your existing coop. That looks like a nice solid roof, so adding some solid structure to the sides should make a nice coop. The biggest issue I see offhand is whether it will be easy to remove the floor of the existing raised coop portion. The ease of that...
What are you thinking of doing? Just lowering the floor of the current coop area, or closing in the entire coop/run to make a larger coop?
It sounds like @dearmeghann enclosed the entire coop/run to make a larger coop, something a number of people here have done (based on accounts that I have...
I guess it comes down to whether you are a night owl for the dark (which I actually realized some might be as I typed my post) or you are a night owl because you suck at time management and never get to bed as early as planned, and really would like to be awake for more of the daylight hours...
I missed this thread when it started last year. I would have said then, and you have probably figured out by now, yes, in cold weather it's great to have your coop inside a protected building!
Our winter coop is inside a corner of our barn (which has couple stalls for horses but they live...
Because every time there is such a movement, people who live on the west sides of time zones and early risers (aka "freaks") want to stick to standard time, and while those who live on the east side of a time zone and night owls (aka "normal people") want to stay on DST all year. Not that I'm...
Combo storage/feeder sounds great. However, I would not put feeder ports in a metal storage barrel. The whole point of using metal is its resistance to access by critters with sharp teeth. If you’re putting holes (the feeder ports) in the container, I don’t see the advantage of a chew-proof...