We have bred chickens to be very trusting. This makes them sometimes too docile. It is easy to put fertile eggs under the brooder hens that we do not want to breed from yet they make good mothers.
How To Save Your Pets In A Heat Wave
Climate change means there will be more freak weather events and more sudden stresses. Some events, such as heatwaves are slow enough to give us a chance to be prepared and act. Sadly, a lot of people don’t know what to do when they and their animals suffer. Don’t wait for the heat wave to arrive, there is plenty we can do in preparation.
Here are some easy tips:
- Give your animals self determination in time
s of stress. Fencing offers security from predators and enables us to manage the animals and plants but fencing can also limit a creature’s choices in difficult times when they really may need to find alternative habit. Leave the gates open in a heat wave, or heavy rain and risk of flood. - Check there is a range of habitat choices including high ground, marshy ground (you can use a sunken dish or fill a pond with earth, water and plants, fresh-water ponds, water-dishes, grasses, shrubs, trees, shade and patches of full sunlight with fresh air (to help kill fungi). Keep trees, shrubbery, nooks and elevated structures within the enclosure to enable you animals to find refuge during floods or to hiding during a heatwave, fire or predator attack.
- Create shade. In a heatwave there are many things you can do to make life more comfortable for animals in the heat. You can get immediate shade by using hessian sacks which you can get from free from many retailers such as coffee grinding outlets, take-away shops or wholesale fruit and vegetable suppliers.
Use a natural cooling system based on heat transfer which occurs during evaporation of water. You can hang wet sacks on the walls of their enclosure and have the tail end of the sacks soaking in a trough of water. The water will be drawn slowly up the sack and dry off in the heat. This makes the surrounding area much cooler. This works most effectively in dry climates. In the tropics, this system would not be as effective as designing the space to catch breezes and funnel them for best use.
If the enclosure has a metal roof, hose this down and then cover it securely with cardboard, hessian, old carpet or woven matting. Add a ventilation device at the rooftop peak to allow hot air to escape or simply cut a hole in the top of the wall to let the heat out. Domestic farm animals are creatures of habit and will return to a roost when they are exhausted and ill even if it will kill them so check that the roost is ventilated.
Snake-Proofing the Hen House
How To Make A Snake-Proof Hen House that is also Quoll and Fox Proof. This design was inspired by my fellow permaculture teacher Janet Millington.
A big advantage of this stepped post system is the vines can grow up the posts whereas a fox-proof ladder as seen in our own hen house design can’t afford to have vines growing up it because the fox could use the vines to help it reach the top. An additional feature to repel snakes is coir matting, snakes find coir very absrasive and prefer not to go over, this is not to say it will stop them if they are hungry, but it might be a good addition.
See our hen house design for the fox-proof ladder.
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Geese Love Bamboo Fence Posts
Our geese love the bamboo fence posts. We love using bamboo too. Bamboo doesn’t stratch us as we work with it like metal does! We first discovered the geese love bamboo when we planted some in their zone. We also came up with the solution to use Bamboo posts when we ran out of metal posts and our new car isn’t as big as the old car so we couldn’t get posts at the harware store without emptying the car boot as we drove. So, we tried bamboo and cut the side branches for the geese to tuck into. The next time we put bamboo in to the fence we simply bent the side pieces to weave it through the fence and let the geese serve themselves. Win/win.