The Omlet Blog Category Archives: Chickens

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?

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Do Plastic Chicken Houses get hot?

I get asked this question A LOT, and the answer is yes plastic chicken houses do get hot in the heat, but so do wooden ones.  Just because a chook house is made from plastic it doesn’t mean that it will heat up more and boil your chooks.

With the Omlet Eglu houses they are double insulated, which means that they keep the inside of the house cooler in summer and warmer in winter.  Now to clarify the double insulation in summer does not mean that your chickens will be living in a fridge!  It is probably around 5 -10 degrees cooler in the house versa outside depending on where the house is situated. (more…)

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Eglu Go UP with 3m run gets Support!

The Eglu Go UP usually comes with a 2m run, however you can buy it with an extra 1m run extension, if you do this, then the run gets a bit wobbly when you put it together…..  Which is why you get 2 green poles to attach to the outside of the run to make it more stable.

Unfortunately at the moment the instructions you get with the 1m run extension doesn’t explain this, so people get left with 2 poles and wonder what they are for 🙁

In the diagram here you can see where to put the 2 poles – one each side of the run where the long red line is. (more…)

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This entry was posted in Chickens