Our chicken run for the laying hens is quite substantial. If the hens choose to they have access to our pasture fields too, and some do. Those chickens that take the trouble to wander further afield are mostly the ones who have cottoned on to the fact that the sheep get a regular supplement of coarse feed each day and so take the opportunity to help themselves side-by-side with the sheep.
We also have a large fenced and fully netted area, in which are situated the hen houses, which we call the 'inner run'. This is where the chickens will be confined to if a 'lockdown' becomes a requirement for avian flu prevention. In the last couple of days several new outbreaks have been detected. My prediction is that the instruction to confine birds will be announced shortly and this will come into effect at the beginning of December. This will take us up to the beginning of April as a cut off date for free range labelling by commercial egg producers. By this time, as I suggested a couple of days ago, the hope would be that it will be possible to lift any restrictions.
Anyway, in anticipation of this, I've been putting a few more things in place in readiness. When going about this task, I took the photograph below which struck me as an interesting view of our netted area. The netted roof is made up of 10mm squares. But the fallen leaves from the overhanging walnut tree still found their way to hang in a strangely uniform manner.
No comments:
Post a Comment