DIY PLAYGROUND
Help stimulate your birds with these enrichment ideas.
Help stimulate your birds with these interesting enrichment ideas.
Grandma’s chickens spent their days walking around pastures, scratching and pecking for breakfast, lunch and dinner; they consumed few, if any, treats and racked up the miles in search of meals. Many modern-day chickens are confined to a much more limited space due to the risk of predation or legal restrictions; if they wore tiny pedometers, their daily totals would pale in comparison to grandma’s active birds.
Whether free-range or confined, today’s backyard chickens generally exercise less and are fed far too many treats in addition to their layer ration. Research tells us that a great many of today’s pet chickens are dying prematurely from obesity-related health complications. Fortunately, we can turn that around and optimize the health and lifespans of our backyard flocks with a few common sense modifications to their lifestyle that sound hauntingly familiar: a balanced diet and exercise.
Ring the Bell,
IT’S TIME FOR RECESS!
Inadequate living space puts chickens at greater risk for obesity and behavioral problems, such as feather picking and eggeating. The bare minimum outdoor space allocation is 10 square feet per bird, but more is always better.
Just as with children, bored chickens can get into mischief. Providing enrichment activities within a spacious outdoor area keeps chicken minds busy with no time for unapproved extra-curricular activities, so let’s build an outdoor recreation area that provides ample opportunities to exercise their bodies and their minds. A collateral benefit to all this activity just happens to be endless hours of entertainment for human caretakers.
Playground Planning
Keep things interesting in the chicken yard by mixing in different activities and features periodically. Chickens aren’t especially fond of change, so don’t pull all these tricks out of your proverbial hat simultaneously.
When thinking about the kind of activities you’d like to incorporate into a play space, consider features offering varied vertical heights such as ladders, roosts and stairs that they can jump or fly up onto. Add variety with different textures, colors, overhead elements, hiding places and natural features such as fallen branches, shrubs and trees.
Safety Considerations
Playground features can be added to the inside of a spacious chicken run, but if you’d like to set up a playground space outside the chicken run and your flock does not customarily free range, you may wish to consider portable electric poultry fencing. Fencing will keep chickens confined to the area while preventing access by four-legged predators.
Hawk netting or deer netting secured over the top of the play space works to exclude aerial predators. In the absence of netting, provide chickens with areas to duck underneath for cover such as barrels, rudimentary benches constructed from an old door resting on top of two cinder blocks, an old end table, or a homemade branch tee pee.
Play Yard Placement
A play yard should offer protection from the sun in hot weather. Shade cloth, beach umbrellas and tarps provide relief from the sun’s beating rays as will locating the play yard near naturally shady areas underneath, trees, bushes and ornamental grasses. Chickens should not have to travel far to stay hydrated, particularly in hot weather. Keep clean, fresh drinking water in several locations throughout the play space to encourage hydration.
Water Features
With core body temperatures in the 104 to 107 degrees Fahrenheit range, and without the benefit of sweat glands, chickens have difficulty staying comfortable in high temperatures. A mister in a shady spot in the play yard will be a welcome relief as it cools the air surrounding it and the chickens. In temperatures over 90 degrees, be on the lookout for signs of heat stroke.
In addition to shade and plenty of cool drinking water nearby, keep a bucket or tub full of cool — but not cold — water close to the flock. If any flock member begins to look overheated, panting with wings away from its sides in addition to appearing lethargic or pale in the wattles and comb, immediately submerge the bird in the cool water up to its neck for several minutes. This cooling measure will bring its body temperature down safely and quickly.
Even if chickens are not in danger of heat stroke, a cool dip in the water can be a welcome relief to chickens not inclined to wade into water independently. Some chickens do enjoy wading in shallow pools of water on hot days, in which case, a small toddler pool or shallow container filled with cold water for wading will be appreciated.
Hydrating Treats
You can offer treats as an occasional activity, but you shouldn’t rely on them as a primary form of entertainment. Foods such as cucumbers, zucchini and summer squash that contain a high percentage of water while being low in calories are smart choices. My chickens enjoy a spirited round of cucumber tetherball, and I appreciate that the treat requires a degree of mental agility and some physical effort to consume.
DIY Cucumber Tetherball Materials
• A cucumber or squash
• Bamboo skewer
• Long, sturdy string or floral wire
• Vegetable peeler (optional)
Instructions: Using a skewer, poke a hole through the cucumber that is wide enough to thread the string through.
Once threaded, secure the cucumber tetherball to an overhead tree branch or garden shepherd’s hook. Now pull up a chair with your camera ready: this is good entertainment for the whole family! Some chickens may need to be enticed into participating in this extracurricular activity. Removing a bit of the skin from the cucumber with a vegetable peeler is usually enough to encourage attendance at the party.
String Advisory: Safety first please! If a chicken ingests string, it can wreak havoc in its digestive tract, potentially causing death or creating an emergency situation requiring professional veterinary intervention. When offering chickens treats attached to string, always use a thick material such as sisal that will not easily break. Secure the string
carefully so it cannot come loose from the structure it is attached to and remove it from the chicken yard as soon as they lose interest in the activity or whenever you leave the yard. Always closely monitor chickens with hanging treats. You do not want to miss a minute of it, trust me!
Bowling for Crumbles
Who says a complete layer feed can’t be fun while encouraging fitness? Drill six to eight small holes in an empty, dry plastic water bottle with a ½-inch drill bit, then fill it half way with layer crumbles and a teaspoon of mealworms or scratch.
The chickens will peck at the bottle as it rolls around the yard. As pieces of feed fall out of the bottle, they race each other to nab the nutritious bits! Provide several bottles to the flock simultaneously to avoid conflict and the accumulation of fowl penalties.
Dust Bath 4-Square
Animals living in the great outdoors will be exposed to insects living in their environment, transported into the yard by wildlife — that’s natural and expected. Healthy chickens are able to rid themselves of most pests most of the time by dust bathing, an activity whereby they dig shallow ditches in the ground, roll around in the loose dirt to distribute it throughout their feathers and skin, and subsequently shake it out along with unwelcome hitch-hiking pests.
Insecticides, natural or otherwise, should not be added to chicken dust baths; it is unnecessary and imprudent to attempt to kill every insect in a chicken’s environment for fear of encountering poultry lice or mites at some point in a flock. Materials such as diatomaceous earth are dangerous in high dust environments when inhaled by you or your chickens. Prolonged and repeated exposure to respirable crystalline silica dust
as found in the insecticide diatomaceous earth is known to cause chronic pulmonary disease, silicosis and cancer.
Chickens use the mechanical action of the sand or dirt to rid themselves of most unwelcome pests, but please spare their delicate mucous membranes and respiratory systems a daily barrage of harmful inhalants and safeguard their long-term health by using insecticides only when necessary. Only treat chickens with an appropriate insecticide when an infestation of mites or lice occurs.
Dust bathing not only helps chickens maintain skin condition and plumage; it’s great exercise. Think chicken yoga: a
A homemade branch tee pee gives chickens a place to hide and feel secure.
strategy for staying cool in hot weather and an opportunity to socialize with flock mates. Why not provide your chickens with a choice of safe materials to encourage dust bathing in locations of your choosing?
Offer a variety of containers filled with loose soil, peat moss or good ol’ sand. Large flower pots, buckets or tubs are all great dust bath vessels. My chickens enjoy their choice of peat moss, sand, cedar mulch and plain ol’ loose dirt from the yard. We made a rudimentary frame to section off the materials, but chickens would be just as happy to dust bathe in any or all of the materials at once.
Monkey Roosts
Chickens have a natural instinct to roost up off the ground. Encourage jumping up and flying down by provide your flock with a variety of objects to roost on in varying heights. Use common and uncommon roosting materials such as wide tree branches, chairs, pallets, an old tool box, stumps arranged in varying heights, milk crates, an old park bench or ladders. Or if you’re feeling particularly ambitious ... try your hand at making a chicken gazebo! My chickens love the one Mr. Chicken Chick made for them out of items found right in our backyard!
If you want to try something different, you can also build a simple chicken swing out of an old log and some rope. Pick a log similar in size to the roosts you normally provide. Drill two holes, about the diameter of the rope you plan to use, one on each side of the log. Then, hand the log from a branch, the roof or sides of a play run, or anywhere you can fit it, and you’re chickens will have a swinging perch to hop on at their leisure.
Play Hard
Create a playground that looks different from your flock’s everyday environment, add different elements from time to time, and vary it with season-appropriate activities. The variety will stimulate their minds, keep them out of each others’ hair and encourage much needed exercise. The options for activities are only limited by your imagination, so get out there and enjoy discovering which activities are most appreciated by your pet chickens.
Kathy Shea Mormino, aka The Chicken
Chick, is a backyard-chicken-keeping advocate with a passion for empowering others to raise backyard chickens and have fun doing it. Through her wildly popular, award-winning Facebook page and blog, she shares her fun-loving, informative and practical approach to raising backyard chickens with fans worldwide.