We'll be building our first chicken coop soon, and I'll post my plans and ask for all the advice I can get before I make the first purchase of lumber. For now, here's what our back yard looks like. We have about one acre, most of which is deciduous forest.
Here's a shot of our back yard, which...
Raccoons have very narrow tracks, very similar to a cat... those look like Fisher Cat tracks to me. I've seen them in our neighborhood, as well as all of the other predators listed on BackYardChickens.com's PREDATOR PAGE ( https://www.backyardchickens.com/LC-predators.html ) with the exception...
I should make a confession here: eleven years ago, when we bought our current home, there were seven railroad ties in our yard that the former homeowner admitted to having stolen from the tracks which border our property. I laid them in our hillside, to make steps leading to the yard. The fact...
Very beautiful sketches, and your watercolors are wonderful. You should concentrate on your artistic talent and forget about sewing. You're a natural!!!
I not only don't want creosote in my watershed, in addition I certainly don't want motor oil in it; whether I believe my chickens will ever ingest any or not. I'd make sure to use environmentally safe chemicals if I were to use any preservative on my wood construction. I'd much rather use...
perchie.girl :
Or Pressure treated wood for surfaces that touch the ground.
I read on BackyardChickens.com this morning that you're not supposed to use pressure treated (at least the toxic type) around livestock, especially chickens, who like to peck at and try to eat just about anything. Now...
There's nothing short of fencing our yard and having a dog out there running loose that would keep the varmints out of our yard. We have foxes, coyotes, raccoons, hawks, snakes, rats and many others; due to living next to about twenty acres of un-cut forest.
Personally, I'd rather leave them for the varmints to dispose of (probably the foxes in our neighborhood). I hate contributing to the local dump. It's a veritable mountain of trash on what used to be a really beautiful valley.
If we do lose a chicken, it will most likely be to a raccoon, coyote or Red Fox; those are the varmints I'm most concerned about. I'm definitely going to have the chickens fully enclosed, but need to secure all forms of entry, so I'm reading what others have done and what works before I start...
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Well... the trash goes out on Monday so ...
ETA: what do other people do?
My daughter has lost two fish, and each time made me hold a funeral service for them. Don't know what she'll do if we lose a chick.
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Good question. I wonder what others use. I was planning on using some white translucent fiberglass undulated sheathing (don't know what else to call it) for skylights on my coop roof. Don't want to run a light except for heat, if I don't have to.
Example...