I had a brainstorm about using flyscreen mesh over the top of the hardware cloth on my new coop/run. Is this a dumb idea? I realise the flies will still come in when the door gets opened, but I figure the chooks will soon get rid of those and I'll have sand/DE in teh run anyway. Was hoping to find a way to avoid walking through a sea of flies in this heat - they seem to go for the poop as well as any food scraps on the ground. There's got to be a reason no else has done this.
Over here you can get fly predators, although I haven't used them. I usually just hang one of those disposable fly traps in an out of the way place and that works well here. If you try a layer of screen, let us know how it goes.
I used mosquito screening in my coop because I had some left over from another project. It does interfere somewhat with ventilation but that's not a problem since I'm overbuilt on ventilation anyway. It's nice that the chickens don't have to be pestered by mosquitoes when they roost at night in the summer.
