Who runs Yard Birds?

[Mexas Joe]

Thinking about building a small 4-6 bird coop. Mah back yard is just under an acre and it's fenced. 

The plan is to let them free range during the day and I'll shut them up at night. 

My problems begin with I have no fecking clue what I'm doing to I have a beagle and a terrier yipper dog that are killers of mole, squirrels and other creatures of chance. Is it diffucult to train a dog to Leave Mah GDamn Birds alone? 


Dem Free Range Daily Eggs tho.

[dave]

Probably Clapton, Page, or Beck.

[Gusso]

Probably Clapton, Page, or Beck.

Haha. Was actually thinking of a song to post!

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https://youtu.be/L4DdAs0PddQ

[Augie91]

Nothing like farm fresh eggs! Our local farm supply stores carry nice little chicken coops, chicks, feed etc.

[bdutton]

We have 6 chickens.  I bought a nice used coop.  Then I built a 4x4x8L roofed enclosure to extend the built in run that came with the coop.  I put it next to out back yard pool and added supplemental fencing to make it a larger run.  We let them out into the yard usually for a few hours a day and they run all over the place digging shit up and disturbing a lot of my landscaping but I've gotten used to it.

The eggs are nice.

Here is a picture of the coop and the add on roofed fenced run before I completed it.

[Trub Lou]

No chicken crap in the pool?

My wife is dead set against the idea of keeping chickens. And I don't really need another chore/hobby right now. But it's really amazing the difference in egg quality between the supermarket and the guy just down the street, who we get a dozen from from time to time.

[Augie91]

We used to have a source for farm fresh eggs and that was all we'd eat. They were SO SUPERIOR to store bought eggs. Nice looking birds and setup BD.

[TxBrewer]

I have ten birds now, lost two this past fall. We let them out most of the day and the spend it wandering around eating bugs. One advantage, kinda disgusting, we discovered is they will tear apart dried piles of cow shit looking for grain or bugs in the piles.

It speeds up the process of the piles breaking down into natural fertilizer.

As for training the dogs I only had one dog that was a problem and he killed two birds early in our time having them. The solution was a shock collar and every time he got near a bird he got zapped, nothing terrible just a little buzz. Took a week or so but he learned.