Some Downsides to Having Chickens

By admin on May 01, 2010 with Comments 0

I love having chickens in the backyard, i love the fact that i get gorgeous free range eggs fresh and i have several little garbage disposers that also dispose of grubs and insects and supply my garden with aeration and raking over, that they deposit fertiliser as they go but there is a downside.

Mice!!. I am not a person who likes chemicals, i have little children and prefer not to use baits. I have a cat who is very proficient at catching mice that wander inside but we have gone from 1 mouse a year to 24 in 6 months. When we clean out the chicken coop, mice go everywhere. Luckily chickens also like mice and gobble them as quick as they can. But i dont like killing either. Call me a greeny.

What i have done to lessen the plague is buy a humane mouse trap and stop filling the chickens feeders with grain. I now come in once a day and feed them a cup of grain and veggies and scraps. This has definately slowed the mice growth plan as the chickens gobble it quick. We let them out of the chicken coop before to wander around. The humane mouse trap lets the mice go in but not come out and i simply drive them down the road and let them out at a park. Some predator bird will thank me for it but i dont need to deal with them.

Mice seem to like building tunnels under the chookhouses and come out at night, by feeding the birds in one sitting it reduces the mices feed at night. I worry continuously that my neighbours will start mice baiting which will in turn killy my chickens, my cat or any other animal doing its job, like the resident owl who has moved in. You know you have a good batch of mice when an owl moves in.

So there is a downside but Im still a firm believer in having these fine feathered creatures.

Filed Under: Birds • Featured

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