The entire run is in shade. This is the desert. Metal is still blisteringly hot in the shade. It's tough to understand how extreme it is if you haven't lived in it. It's crazy. I don't like it. It causes all kinds of problems.
We were sparrow-free for a while today! They were flying around very...
I will take a picture of the door later, it's hot right now. It wasn't a mouse nest. Our mice don't nest high up in trees like that. The nest was about 12 feet off the ground (I hurt my shoulder trying to dislodge it). It looked like this. It was well made. I don't know how long it had been...
Those are metal and it's 115F here during the day. It would cook the feed and burn the chickens. It's hard to appreciate what happens to metal in the desert heat if you don't live here. We use oven mitts to open our car doors. Metal anything inside the coop and run is a big no no.
Feed is not...
We're having a lot of trouble with sparrows so we're trying to cover our entire run with bird netting but it's hard to secure it in some areas because parts of the run are hard to reach from the outside. The run is made from steel welded wire fencing with a 2"x4" mesh. If we attach bird netting...
How much time per day does feed need to be available? I need to limit access to food because sparrows are eating the pellets from our port feeders. The sparrows hang around all day. I've put up bird netting but it has problems of its own and it hasn't completely stopped them. We live in the...
I must be stupid because I cannot figure out how to use bird netting over a door. It gets tangled and caught on everything and takes forever.
I found a sparrow nest - empty but I removed it anyway. It was really well padded inside with feathers from my chickens!!
I went out there five times so far today, plugging holes I didn't even know were there. There must have been seven or eight sparrows in there at once, jumping from dish to dish, eating all the food and bathing in (and pooping in) the foot baths. I'm really starting to hate these guys!
AMEN!
I have dogs but they don't go outside much in the summer because it's too hot. They just do their business and come right back in. The hens are scared of them anyway so the dogs don't go in that part of the yard. The neighbors' cats sometimes come around but again it's hot now and I think...
I need to rebuild the run with hardware cloth but that is a project for fall or winter. It's too hot here to have any metal inside the run. I will try adding some fake owls outside the run later this month.
Getting back to my original question, there's nothing that I can add to the feed that's...
Wow, that's an expensive one. I don't have a cat. I don't mean to be ghoulish but how do you kill them? I avoid killing if I can but if I need to I can do it. Can you do it quickly?
I bought some more bird netting. It seems to help although sometimes it just traps them inside rather than keeping them out. I need to find all the little places they might still be getting in.