Build Your Chicken Pen Like Fort Knox!

[Chris 2,162]

In a few months the local Tractor Supply will be having their Chick Days, and newbies who've thought it'd be nice to have a couple laying hens in the backyard will be taking boxes of fluffballs home, smiling and happy, but perhaps unaware that those birds will need more than a couple fenceposts and some chicken wire to keep them safe. 

Hands down, the one thing I tell every single person just starting with poultry is this: Build your pen like Fort Knox.

Plain old chicken wire is great for some uses, but anywhere a predator can dig underneath your building and get in you will want to secure it with hardware cloth. 

Any building or enclosed flight pen I dig down around 4" at least and bury part of the hardware cloth. From there up, it depends on what I'm building. If it's a coop, I focus on the hardware cloth being more in the ground and then let the wall of the structure secure them from there. 

I have one pen which is part enclosed, part open wall. There, I have the hardware cloth still in the ground, but then up about 2' to a cross beam, a 2x4 is fine. From there up it's chicken wire. Kinda like this:
 

 

Not only is nothing going to dig its way in, but nothing like a raccoon is going to reach in and grab young birds. 

Below are a couple pics from a more recent project:

Before...

...and after

You can do this for all varieties of poultry, not just chickens. 

This does not take into account aerial predators. Some people choose to cover their outdoor runs completely with fencing or string wire or fishing line across to deter raptors. I do neither, but do offer some form of protection where necessary for the birds to run to. For example, our outdoor chicken run is huge, there's no way to cover it. But there's a lot of natural brush which the birds will congregate under if a hawk flies overhead, even after the leaves fall off. It's just too much growth for the hawks to get at the birds. I've watched them try.  It also offers a shady spot to take a dust bath in the Summer heat.

Sometimes despite this advice people must think it's overkill or something. Sure enough, a few months later I'll see them post online how something got in and killed all their birds. I had to learn the hard way too, and lost some nice birds to mink, raccoons or other predators. Those days are long over now though. Hopefully I can help someone else make the same mistake.