Chicken Jail

If you’ve been reading our newsletter for a while, you might remember me talking about our flock of rebellious chickens – the ones who kept getting in the goat pen and laying eggs in the goat feeder.  The ones who perched on top of the wall dividing the chicken stall from the goat stall and pooping right into the goat stall. The ones I would find wandering around on the driveway. Yes, those chickens.  

Since I last wrote about them, we’ve lost a few, so I, in my infinite wisdom, thought we needed more chickens.  I had seen some really beautiful black and white chickens in France and decided I needed to have a few of them.  And maybe a few black and brown ones because they’re just so pretty and wouldn’t that look great with the black and white chickens?  And of course a few grey ones to replace the two we had lost.  So I got 6 baby chicks in the spring and have watched them become beautiful chickens.  Everything I had hoped for in adding to my little flock.  There was just one problem, and you probably guessed it.  The older chickens were starting to teach the younger chickens their rebellious ways – flying up to perch on the wall at night and pooping – and then just hanging out in the goat pen all day.  

Well, one day a week or so ago, I went down to the barn to get something and stopped to say hello to the goats and chickens.  And ALL 9  chickens were in the goat pen – laying in their feed trough, perched on their water bucket, scratching around in their bedding and just generally getting underfoot.  Poor Opal looked at me with her weird and beautiful goat eyes, pleading with me to please, for the love of god, do something.  Now, I really like that my chickens are able to roam in the fenced area outside of the barn and range semi-freely, but this was getting out of hand. Those poor goats had just about had it.  So I petted Opal and reassured her that I would, in fact, do something and began implementation of “operation chicken jail,” as Lauren liked to call it, in order to retrain them.  

The next morning we started our operation by first by adding bird spikes to the wall in between the goat and chicken stalls so they couldn’t roost there anymore and then installed a few rolls of chicken wire to heighten the fencing in the outside area of their stall so they couldn’t fly over.  This should work we thought, as we looked proudly at our handiwork and at all of the chickens now in the outside pen.  

Two seconds later one of the chickens found a gap under the fence and slid right under, with several others following close behind. Those were some smart chickens.  So we found some pavers and rocks and closed the gap under the fence.  OK that should really do it, we said, and we headed up to the house.

That night when I went down to the barn to shut everything up and see how the chickens were adjusting to their new restrictions, I was greeted with a row of chickens who had shimmied over to an unspiked area and were now perched on top of the door to the goat stall. They weren’t on the wall anymore, so that was good news, but they were apparently very persistent chickens as well as being smart.  I shooed them down into their stall and closed everything up, recognizing that this might be more of a challenge than I thought.  

So the next morning, Lauren and I implemented “operation chicken jail round 2,” adding more spikes, this time to the top of the goat stall door.  OK…this should do it we thought, once again proud of our handiwork and our ability to outsmart chickens.

That night I went down to close up the barn, and there were no chickens on the wall between the stalls and no chickens on the goat’s stall door.  But there were about 5 chickens roosting on the door to the chicken stall, the only place left that didn’t have spikes.  Again, they are persistent.  

So the next morning, we added more spikes all the way across both doors.  OK, this should really do it we thought.  

And it did.  Finally.  

The chickens have begun laying eggs in their perfectly good lay boxes instead of the goat’s hay trough and are lounging around in their newly reinforced stall and outside area.  Hopefully the young chickens won’t remember their rebellious days and will settle into a less adventurous existence.  And Lauren and I are feeling pretty good about ourselves, knowing that we are smarter that a bunch of chickens. Operation Chicken Jail? Mission Accomplished.

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