I love the idea of our cluckers free ranging in the yard, but the dream and the reality are miles apart!The girls have taken to scratching up any new seedling I have put in, which is bad enough, but the bigger problem is that they have taken to digging in my only established garden, the shady garden near the house.
I love this part of the garden because I have been able to grow ferns and other shade lovers. It has been looking lush and pretty.So I suppose because it is cool and inviting they spend hours finding bugs and worms. It has got to the point that they have exposed roots, leaving hollows every where.
It had to stop! So Michael kindly offered to put a roof on the chook yard. It had one before, but we used fruit tree netting and that got weighed down with fallen leaves, so we took it off.
Guthrie and Mike started putting chicken fencing up for the roof, but arrived back in the house after ten minutes. They couldn't have finished so quickly, surely? Well, it turns out that a carpet python was in the tree that Mike had been chopping limbs off and Guthrie was standing under it! When they discovered the carpet python, they got out of there! Carpet pythons are beautiful snakes, with a lovely white,black and yellow banded pattern, and though not venomous, can still bite.
After that we decided that it was all too much trouble, so the girls got their wings clipped. I never wanted to do it, feeling it was cruel, but it is probably better than me killing them in a fit of rage after discovering more dead plants!
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