No-dig Duck Run Floor?

[skatuska]

Hi everyone - I've been reading these forums for a while as I got ready to bring home a flock of 10 ducks, and am finally getting ready to build my duck run as the ducks will be headed outside in the next month or so.

The run I'm going to build is going to be roughly 25 feet by 40 feet for the 10 ducks (which looks to be plenty big based on my research), but I'm struggling to find the best flooring option. My yard is very rocky, so digging up the full perimeter to bury wire fencing 1 foot deep would be a pain, so I'm thinking of just laying down 1 inch wire netting on the bottom to keep any digging predators out, but I'm not sure if that's good enough to keep the ducks safe. My current plan is to build the run out of 4x4s, with 1/4 inch netting on the sides, and then 1 inch netting on the floor and bird netting on the top (we have lots of hawks in the area).

Does that seem like a good plan for the 10 ducks?

Sorry if there's a thread on this - I searched and all I could really find was about coop flooring, not run flooring.

Thanks in advance for any help here!

 

[Dreysander]

We can't dig here either, what we did was we took pressure treated 4 x 4s and put hardware cloth underneath them like a carpet, the 4 x 4s hold it down. Then we took big spikes and spiked the 4 x 4s into the ground. After that, we covered the hardware cloth with gravel, then with topsoil. So far it's working really well.

 

[skatuska]

Thanks for the quick response - was the gravel/topsoil mostly for drainage? The spot where I'm building the run is on grass, the wire is really only to prevent predators from digging in, do you think the gravel/soil is still necessary? Drainage shouldn't be much of an issue for me. Thanks.

 

[Dreysander]

The gravel was for drainage, the topsoil is because there's no grass or anything to speak of where we built the coop, just rock.

 

[skatuska]

OK, so sounds like I should be good with the drainage situation I'm in. Thanks so much for the help here