Turkey run

Getting ready for work this morning there was a real feeling that Autumn was in the air. Since the start of the month the days seem to have got noticeably shorter and our alarm is now going off whilst it’s still dark outside. By shifting our morning routine around it’s still possible (just) for us to let the chickens and turkeys out when it’s light before we go to work but we know that won’t last for much longer. In preparation for having to open up the turkey shed in the dark (and knowing that there’s a greater risk of a fox dropping by at that time) we recently decided to give our birds some additional protection by building them a run.

It’s taken a busy couple of weeks to get the work finished but we think the effort’s been worth it. We decided to use quite a narrow mesh wire (13mm x 25mm) to prevent wild birds and mice from using the feeder, or stoats and foxes from getting to the turkeys. The frame itself is simply made from lengths of treated 2x1 timber that we picked up from B&Q and cut to size. In total the materials cost £160, which isn’t too bad for a walk-in run that’s a little more than 10 square feet.

We wondered how the turkeys would respond to having a new structure suddenly appear outside their ‘house’ but they don’t seem to have been bothered by it at all. In fact they seem to really like the roost that we built into the frame – they hopped up on it almost as soon as we put it in! We still have a couple of finishing touches to make – not least burying some chicken wire around the outside of the run to prevent anything from digging its way in. With any luck those will keep for a few days as we’ve got a some other jobs to be getting on with this week before we head off on a short break.