I just had to share what happened to me yesterday.
I am letting the girls out for no only 2 hours a day. My husband is gonna build the run soon. Busy man he is. Anyway they are happy.
I went yesterday to get some scratch to put in the coop so they have something to do. I told the guy at the feed store I needed it because my chickens were mad at me that I was confining them to their coop and not letting them run around wild anymore.
He just looked at me and he said, "Ma'am, chickens don't have a brain big enough to be mad at you." I said I know, but they act mad at me and I am struggling with them not having the run of the yard, they need their exercise. He told me, "Ma'am, they get 1 square foot per chicken in commercial chicken houses. Your chickens are just fine. They are just chickens."
Well, for one thing I personally feel the commercial chickens have a bad wrap and would never compare my chickens to those poor animals. But he was so cute how he said it. Little old country man with a suburban housewife coming in totally trying to appease her chickens. I must of seemed wacky to him. Anyway, it was cute.
I think a roving chicken ark would not work for me because in Florida, we get very hot. Very hot. 95% of my backyard in in the dead sun. We did have shade until about two months ago we had a 50 year old laurel oak fall in our back yard. So shaded yard gone in 20 seconds. The girls coop is in the only shaded part of the yard left. Anyway it would seem like more trouble than its worth trying to get them in there, move them around, get them back in their coop. IMO.
I was thinking, and let me know what ya'll think. What about putting a layer of pine bark in the run? They love that stuff. It wouldn't be able to get flicked out because I will use hardware cloth and the pine bark is too big to go through. So in essence they will just be continually flicking it all over just like they do in the beds.