Last week as soon as we came back from our weekend away we got stuck in to moving the chickens.
Chicken World is looking decidedly worse for wear. After the chooks being in the same spot for the two and a half years we have lived here and the bad, wet Winter that we have just had it is time to rest the land a bit. Lovely Hubby also has plans to landscape it slightly to make it all easier to mow and safer to walk on in wet conditions and add a new permanent fence along the roadside, which will be so much easier to do without birds under his feet.
The best way to move a lot of chickens so that you don't cause a huge ruckus is to wait until they have all roosted for the night and one by one removed them from the perches and pop them into a chicken crate.
We carried them over to Chicken Land, which is in our baby orchard, (young trees that is ... we are not growing babies .... phew!!) in three lots, we have a trio of heavy birds and the crate weighs a bit to start with so we made sure only one of these was in each load.
Three trips later and they were all sat on perches in their new house and no doubt wondering what all the fuss was about. Ginger helped us out, wandering over with us every time we took a load of birds across but the dogs were confined to the house to save a lot of barking and upsetting the birds.
As night fell on their new home they were tucked up safe and sound.
Now I can spy on them from the bedroom window ...
... and they have the sheep as neighbours. The lambs were very interested the first morning when I let the chickens out.
Their favorite thing seems to be the wind and rain shelter that we made for them. Simply a piece of the old, old henhouse resting on and nailed to a horizontal bit of wood that Lovely Hubby added to the fence.
There was one thing we didn't really think about ...... doh !!
Sue xx
