Entertaining Your Girls

If your chickens are pecking at the fence or run wire it may be because they are bored.

Chickens are pretty intelligent animals and are a bit like children who are bored, they turn a bit naughty!  This naughtiness might be in the form of pecking through their fence if is a nylon one.

Why Do Chickens Get Bored?

A bit like us it is because they have nothing to entertain them…  The reasons they get bored can be because:

• There is nothing to peck at in their run, maybe the grass has all gone
• You have had to move them into a smaller run or area due to colder weather
• Their run is just dirt, nothing interesting in there for them

Ideas to Help Prevent Chicken Boredom:

• Hang up a bird feeder with vegetable leaves in it
• Hang up a whole cabbage, the fun with this is that it moves around as it is pecked which makes it harder for the chicken
• Use something like broccoli and hang it so that the chickens have to jump to reach it, exercise, entertainment and food in one!
• Hang up bird toys that you would buy for parrots, you could easily make one of these as well
• Hang up a mirror, they love looking at themselves – they find it fascinating
• Throw in some straw or hay with a handful of sunflower seeds or mealworms for them to peck around and find
• Fill an empty plastic bottle with chicken scratch, then piece the sides with holes so that the chickens have to roll the bottle around to get the scratch
• Add a dust bath to the run, this can be as simple as a container filled with sand
• Freeze treats like sweetcorn into ice cubes so they have to peck through the ice to get the corn
• Hang up old cds so that they move in the breeze
• Add extra perches, this can be an old wooden crate or a tree stump, it doesn’t need to be fancy
• Add a chicken swing, hours of entertainment swinging to and fro

What do you do to keep your chooks entertained?

This entry was posted in Chickens