Keeping Chickens

Fox Sniffing Around The Chicken House.

Mr Fox eyes up our new arrivals!

I’m a pretty easy going ‘live and let live’ kind of a chap, but I can see I’m going to have my work cut out with staying this way with Mr Fox!

On Sunday night, I was sitting up the end of the garden having a smoke on the steps of the cabin - the master of all I survey.

It’s my favourite spot in the evening and usually I go up there after the kids have been bathed and in bed. I look down the garden back at the house, listen for the owls and look out for the bats patrolling the garden.

During the ‘day time’, I now also get to watch the chickens in their run from here, so it’s my favourite spot by far… It’s lovely!

Well, I was sitting there and I heard a rustling in next door’s garden. Nothing unusual, we live in Surrey so there’s usually a bit of ‘wild life’ about. Next I hear the sound of something climbing the fence. I sit still and wait.

A few seconds later Mr Fox comes walking right past the edge of the cabin, past me and up to the chicken house. I’m dumb founded. I thought foxes could smell a ‘human’ a mile off. I clap my hands and shout at Mr Fox. He turns, sees me and runs off down the side of the garden and back over the fence into the neighbour’s garden.

It just so happens that I was watching one of the discovery channels the other week and they had a episode of River Cottage on. In it Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall was looking at ways to protect ‘his’ chickens. He visited the local barber and collected hair cuttings off the floor from the barber, he then put the hair in ‘tights’, and tied the hair bundles to the chicken’s fence.

He reckoned that the hair held the ’smell of man’ for longer than ‘wee’, and that it would put Mr Fox off of exploring further.

The other option (so I hear) is for the males in our house hold to ‘mark our boundary’. My eldest is ‘well up’ for this and already relieves himself in the garden as much as possible. Now all I have to do is to convince him to go down the end of the garden… I don’t know however if ‘toddler wee’ has the right kind of chemical balance to put off Mr Fox!

The only problem with my weeing in the garden to put the fox off from investigating the chickens, from my point of view is if the neighbours see me - this could be a tad difficult to explain, getting caught with one’s trousers down so to speak.

My wife suggests (as practical as ever) that I collect it in a container and take it down the garden to ‘mark’ the areas we think the fox is using to get in. She reckons this is the next best thing to actually doing it there and then. It does mean perhaps that my cabin will now get a WC - in the form of a old container for wee at least!

We shall wait and see if this method works, and how the chickens fair with Mr Fox.