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Fox proof your chicken coop or you won’t have chickens for long
One of the biggest threats to the safety and well-being of your chooks is foxes.
If you live in the country you’ll know all about foxes. From time to time you’ll even see them brazenly walking around during the day.
But don’t think, if you live in the city, that foxes are a threat to your chickens. They are. There are plenty of foxes that live in suburbia.
So no matter where you live you must make some simple precautions to make sure that your chooks are protected from attack by a fox.
Your chicken coop must be fox proof. It should have a door that can be closed at night, and no entry holes where a fox can enter, even a small one.
However it’s not sufficient just to have checks for all entry points for a fox. Foxes are wily and it is more difficult to outfox them than that.
Foxes are very good at digging, and they will happily dig underneath the walls of your chicken coop to get at your chooks.
And so it is necessary to not only ensure that your coop has no entry points but also that a fox is unable to dig underneath the walls to get at your chooks.
There’s a number of ways to do this. One of the most effective is to have a concrete floor on your chicken coop. A concrete floor means that no matter how much a fox digs it is unable to get through the concrete floor. It also makes the coop much easier to clean.
Another way is to dig chicken wire into the ground beneath the walls. That way, when the fox begins to dig, he hits wire and gives up. You can dig the chicken wire vertically down into the ground, though it’s easier to dig it down 10 centimetres or so and then laid horizontally under the ground out from the walls, for about 50 centimetres.
And the 3rd way, which I use, is simply to cover the floor of the coop with chicken wire before laying down your sawdust. This is as effective as concrete but much cheaper.
The final way, which I also utilise, is very effective but more expensive. As I live on a farm I have an electric fence, and all you need to do is to run an electric wire around the base of the fence that surrounds the coop about 10 centimetres off the ground. A fox will happily dig under the fence to get to your chicken coop, but if he hits the electric wire 1st he’ll be gone.
And that has protected my chickens for many years.
