Tag Archives: Poultry
Chickens explore a re-grassed chicken run.

Keeping chickens: The Run

To thrive and do well, chickens need access to an outdoor area where they can forage, dust bathe, exercise and indulge their natural behaviours. The chicken run fulfils those requirements, whether it’s a one-acre field, a section of orchard, half a back garden or a couple of square metres of wood and mesh attached to a [...]

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A flock of chickens in a snow-covered run, outside a large chicken house.

Keeping chickens: housing

There are so many different approaches to housing chickens that it is difficult to decide which style to go with, which materials to go with and whether to build or buy, especially for people looking for the ‘right’ house. There are small, lightweight houses for the urban chicken keeper, made of plastic, lightweight plywood or [...]

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A snow-covered chicken house and run.

Keeping chickens: the site

One of the advantages of keeping chickens is that they are small enough to make it straightforward to replicate the conditions in which their ancestors originally evolved. The Red Jungle Fowl, from which the chicken descends, tends to be found in mixed forests and forest-grassland margins. These are  habitats where they have access to taller [...]

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A group of Scots Grey hens foraging.

Keeping chickens: basics

Small-scale chicken keeping goes through regular bouts of increased popularity, depending on media coverage of issues that catch the public eye: ‘living the good life’, animal welfare, the cost of food, ‘downsizing’, the ‘cuteness’ factor and more. We’ve seen this several times in the past eight years and are experiencing a fresh resurgence of interest [...]

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A male sparrowhawk hanging off the roof of a cockerel run.

Sparrowhawk hangs about

I locked the chickens up at 4.30pm. All were fine and there were no visitors in the main run or the cockerel runs. I went back out at 6.30pm to feed the pigs, but stopped when Harvey, our Border Terrier, ran to the chicken runs baying madly. When I investigated, I found a male sparrowhawk [...]

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