How far will chickens jump down?

[Jon James]

I have a good size garden that I plan to let my chickens free range in when I am there, the rest of the time they have a run.

The garden has reasonable walls/fences on three sides but on the forth it has a tatty hedge on top of a retaining wall (the top of the wall being level with my garden). The wall is about two and a half meters tall and about thirty five meters long. I don't really want to run chicken wire all the way along the hedge.

My question is this, will the chickens go through the hedge and jump down off the wall into the land next door? If they did they wouldn't be able to get back up and also would be very hard to retrieve.

Many thanks
Jon

 

[secuono]

They will glide down if they want to get over there...

 

[Jon James]

Quote:
Are they likely to?
Its a large concrete yard next door.

I guessed they could glide down there but hoped they wouldn't as they won't be able to return.

Its going to be a real pain to have to put wire along the whole hedge, besides it would look horrid.

However I do want them to be able to free range the garden when I'm in it.

 

[Wisher1000]

I see two choices. One, wait and see. It is possible that they will go down and you can leave them a while, they will see that they can't get up and have no food or water and it may be enough to discourage them from going down again. Two, maybe you could put some bird netting on the less visible side with the bottom peged down and the top attached to the hedge. Just a thought...

 

[debid]

They're not going to stand at the top and consider whether they'll be able to get back up if they jump, if that's what you're asking. Their brains are the size of a pea and that's simply beyond their thought process. I'm guessing they won't go because the yard lacks cover and doesn't look promising for scratching... but chickens do like to explore so you never know.

 

[BWSY]

I needed to keep my chickens out of a garden area. I would have loved a picket fence but the cost would be too much for my zero budget. So I bought some self staking green wire (not too cheap looking) 3' tall fencing. But the determined wide buttock chickens slid right through the four inch spacings between the vertical wires. (no horizontal wires except near the bottom and top) So I got some 36" plastic fencing with 1" squares. I cut that in half so it was 18" high and weaved that through the self staking fence. It looks OK and it keeps them out. They haven't tried to hop over it. I think it looks too unstable for them to try. They do hop over a raised bed wall that's the same height.

So if the bushes are solid branches at the top but has openings at the base you may be able to some type of short self staking panels along the edge. Just make sure it has smaller openings. Maybe you can post a photo of the bushes.

 

[Jon James]

I think some bird netting on the opposite side might be the way to go.
I think I will just plug the big gaps and hope my garden is a much better place to be than the yard next door!

Thanks for all the advice. Any other suggestions please let me know.

Kind regards
Jon

 

[elmo]

There's just no way to tell in advance, sorry.

Our bantams are very good fliers and could easily fly over the 6 foot fence surrounding our yard. They could, but they don't. I free range them only under supervision, and none of them has shown the slightest interest in checking for greener pastures yonder. I do have one hen that persistently tries to lay on the 6 foot high roof of one of our runs, though.

However, someone who has some bantams that are related our our chickens (cousins, if you will) reports that hers do wander and have gotten out of her yard several times.

Try the bird netting and see how it works. Your chickens may be like ours and want to stay home.

 

[BitsyB]

Like others have said you'll have to see what they do. Hope that they don't, be prepared if they do...

I had one chicken who would jump onto a pine tree branch and then repeatedly fly over a 4' fence into the neighbor's yard, my other five chickens never did. (There were workman building an addition over there and she liked to visit them. One morning I looked out to see her perched right in the framed-out window, before the workmen arrived. It was like she was inspecting the construction or something.)

I solved the problem by putting up bird netting to block access.

 

[patandchickens]

Quote:
Can they? Certainly. Will they? Who knows. It is real hard to predict which chickens will try to go 'over the wall' and which won't. You may just have to wait and see. If the retaining wall, that the hedge is atop, is actually 2.5 m high (which is, what, like eight feet?) then the chciekns are probably no likelier to go up onto/over THAT than onto/over the fencing on the other three sides of the yard.

Good luck, have fun,

Pat