Quote:
Should have said:
natural to your environment to your flocks environment
Your flock adapts to your environment if raised there. Provide the essentials with plenty of natural surroundings and they will take care of themselves without much inteference into their normal daily lives.
Agreed ... I was being a wise-guy about the horse dung. Adobe is great in the SW.
Ours birds are low maintenance; they generally coop themselves up at night and I only need to send a kid out to count them and close the door for the evening. They know where to hide when they forage, and they have their "routes" they follow, scratching under the pines for bugs. They seem content with their home.
I did put a bit of $$ into the coop, though. We are in an area that is rapidly becoming suburbs. The two large farms down the road have turned into a high-density and very pricey subdividion ($800k townhouses, $1.3mil for single family homes, snooty shops, snooty people). We are still on land zoned mixed residential/Ag, where you can keep livestock as long as you have more than an acre fenced. Nonetheless, we hear people from the development walking their little rat-dogs past, spotting our chickens through the pines than line our property, and saying "Chickens? They can have CHICKENS?" ... yeah, lady, we can have a freakn' bull inside that fence if we want to, and we were here long before you ...
... but anyway, we built a small gable roofed coop, painted it the same color as the house, put on a shingled roof, and tried to make it "fit in." Cost a bit more ... on the other hand, it's insulated, and the cement-fiber siding I used is rated for 50 years. It rains hard here, it's hot and humid in the summer, and we had more snow than Chicago a couple years ago, in spite of being much further south. I tried to build for the weather, and for not having to replace rotting wood every few years. That and years involved in engineering have caused me to over-engineer things. Occupational disease.
