Chicken run materials

Hello and welcome to BYC! Everyone loves a good chicken dinner, so to make sure only the 'right' folks get to take advantage of that privilege, it looks like we need to pen up the girls. I only have the vaguest idea as to what fish net is, regarding the hole size you are considering using. But you could perhaps use it to cover the top, which looks like that might be a priority, and if the hole size is small enough to keep the birds from getting out, yes you could use it. However the standard BYC answer is always half-inch hardware cloth… for everything.

If the hen house or coop is secure, and you lock them up in it nightly, the run material can be less than 'half-inch hardware cloth.' Sometimes real world problems require real world solutions, as long as you understand the trade off in cost vs. net quality, you can make it work. Common sense needs be applied, please do so. Only you can see the danger, and take the steps required to mitigate same. There is a difference between a sustained night time attack, and a casual day time encounter on the run. Those raccoons do only come out at night… and if they can, they will get to the birds, and you will be very sad your secure coop was not. But I use light weight wire round here for day runs. I secure the birds in a building during the evening hours.

I have not used them, yet, but I understand that those blinking red, solar powered LED light, help to deter critters from visiting the coop at night. You might consider adding that to your defense strategy. Common sense works uncommon wonders, use your intuition, your insight to the problem and do what will work, until you can do something better.

Best to you and your birds,

RJ