About overhead protection for the flock. I think trees work great for overhead protection and can also provide awesome forage area for birds. I know my birds love the little backyard orchard and adore scratching around under evergreens and though there are *always* hawks screeching overhead, I haven't yet lost a bird to a hawk because so far I have the birds pastured in the orchard. I am hoping to expand the orchard, so have been researching what kinds of things I could plant that would be interesting for me and for the birds while providing good cover. Planting new trees can be a big time investment while you wait for produce, but now is the time to be planning what kind of trees to plant in the spring (in North America, now is when nursery harvest begins, and shipping the baby trees to the garden centers is soon to follow).
Earlier I posted that a good business associate of ours has a nursery local to us that sells exotic fruit trees & shrubs, etc., that he has traveled the world to find and worked to naturalize to our area (Pacific Northwest). His online business is called One Green World. Here is a link to his website:
https://www.onegreenworld.com/ If you're at all into plants you could get lost in that website, and it is a great place to learn even if you live outside the shipping area. There are some searches already organized at the website ... this one looks very promising ...
https://www.onegreenworld.com/articles.php?article_id=27
I spoke to the owner recently about helping me design a Chicken Orchard, and he said it sounds fun. I've already requested both Mulberries and Pawpaws in this orchard, both are things he grows. The goal would be to plant a big variety of things that provide fruit for as much of the year as possible, but not too much all at once. Also a mixture of trees and shrubs would provide the best coverage for the birds.
I've read that chestnut trees are great for chickens ... this article talks about different kinds of things to plant for forage, including both chestnut & mulberry trees
http://www.motherearthnews.com/home...feed-zmaz10fmzraw.aspx?PageId=1#axzz2kMWT9jUi ... We grow chestnut trees here and have some old mulberry trees we could probably use to propagate more.
One of the cool things about the Pawpaws I mentioned above is they prefer to grow under the cover of another tree, so maybe planting them under mature evergreens or flowering ornamentals could work. They are also already native to North America, so finding one to do well in my zone shouldn't be too difficult. There are lots of native fruiting things we've all but forgotten about ... native plants can allow for Xeriscaping, which could be very useful here as we have very dry summers. Other things I could probably water with duck-pond waste water if I worked it right
For more normal fruit trees, my chickens LOVE the plum tree in their pasture! The variety they have access to at the moment is Brooks Prune (a variety of plum that can be eaten fresh or dried ... it bakes pretty well, too), and the chickens are even more wild about those plums than they are about the apples and pears. The turkeys LOVE apple drops, but they haven't had access to the plums yet.
I really want fig trees ... maybe some olives ... filberts do really well here ...
Maybe some "fencing" could be built out of grape vines or raspberry canes or thornless blackberries or a hedgerow of Oregon Grapes? The chickens would just climb most things, but most things would work to contain flightless ducks and commercial-breed turkeys.
I can already tell the Chicken Orchard project will be a lot chicken math!
