A bored flock finds something to do, and what they find is usually each other. I lost the back feathers off 2 hens one February. I treated for mites, changed the feed, worried a lot. Neither was the problem. They had 40 square feet of flat dirt and nothing in it. Here’s what went into the run, what it cost me, and the 3 things I bought that did absolutely nothing.
Boredom shows up as feather pecking
You’ll see it on the back first. Then around the vent. Ragged edges, then bare skin.
It’s easy to blame mites, and you should rule those out. Go in after dark with a torch and look under the wings. If the skin is clean and the feathers are just gone, you’ve got a behaviour problem, not a parasite one.
Crowding and boredom are the usual causes. Low protein can feed into it too.
Take it seriously early, because it spreads. One bird starts and the rest copy her. And once a bird draws blood on another, things get bad fast.
Dust baths come before anything else
Build this one first. It’s free and they’ll use it every day.
Dust bathing is how your birds handle lice and mites themselves. They work dry grit down to the skin, and it does the job you’d otherwise be doing with a puffer bottle of powder.
Mine is a plastic tub, about 2 feet across, filled with dry dirt and 2 scoops of wood ash from the stove. That’s the whole recipe.
Keep it dry. Which really means keep a roof over it, because wet ash is just a mess.
I’d skip the diatomaceous earth, honestly. It’s unpleasant dust to be breathing (yours and theirs) and plain dry dirt already works fine.
Give them somewhere to get up off the floor
A run that’s flat end to end is a boring run.
Chickens like height. They also like being able to get away from each other, and you can’t do that on a flat patch of dirt.
I put 2 bars in at different heights, cut from an old ladder. Cost nothing.
The low one gets used all day for sunning. The high one is where a hen goes when she’s had enough of the rooster, which is most afternoons.
Give a bird somewhere to retreat to and a lot of the squabbling just stops.
Scatter the scratch, don’t bowl it
A bowl of scratch is gone in 4 minutes. The same handful thrown across the run takes them the best part of an hour.
That hour is the entire point. Foraging is what your birds would be doing all day if you weren’t feeding them.
It’s the cheapest enrichment there is. It costs you nothing but a different wrist movement.
I throw a scoop into the litter around 3pm, which is when mine get restless and start looking at each other.
Keep it a treat, though. Scratch is mostly corn and it isn’t balanced feed, so it shouldn’t be more than a small part of what they get.
A cabbage on a string is worth 2 minutes
Hang a whole cabbage so it swings at about head height. They’ll be on it all afternoon.
The swinging is what does the work. A cabbage on the ground gets eaten in 10 minutes. One that moves has to be chased.
Any dense green will do. Cabbage just lasts longest.
This is the best return on effort in the whole run. 2 minutes and a bit of twine.
Weeds and clippings, with 1 thing to watch
Everything I pull out of the garden goes over the fence. Free food, free entertainment, less for the compost heap.
The thing to watch is long grass clippings. A crop packed with long tough strands can cause real trouble, so I keep clippings short and fresh. I don’t tip in a big pile of long wet mowings.
Fresh is the other half of it. A heap of grass left sitting starts to heat up, and I wouldn’t feed it after that.
Weeds, leafy tops, bolted lettuce, the woody ends of things. All fine. They love the lot.
Logs, stumps and a pile of leaves
Drag a rotting log in and leave it there. Every few days they’ll flip it over looking for what’s underneath.
A stump does the same job. It doubles as somewhere to stand, which they like.
Come autumn I rake leaves into a corner about 6 inches deep. They work through that for weeks, and what’s left breaks down into the bedding.
None of it costs a penny. That’s rather the point.
Mirrors and shiny toys did nothing here
I bought a mirror and 2 of those hanging plastic things sold as chicken toys. About $20 the lot.
They got investigated for a day. Then ignored completely, forever.
I don’t think they do any harm. I just wouldn’t spend the money again, and you don’t need to either.
What holds their attention is anything to do with food or scratching. Which makes sense, when you think about what a chicken is actually built to do all day.
So: things that hide food, things that move, things they can dig in. Not decorations.
Swings work, but not for every bird
A flat bar on 2 ropes, hung low so it barely moves.
Turns out some birds take to it and some never touch it. 2 of my 12 use the swing. The other 10 walk past it every day of their lives.
Hang it low enough that a fall is nothing. Steady enough that it doesn’t tip, too.
A swing that dumps a hen once will never be used again. She’ll remember.
Worth building out of scrap. Not worth buying.
None of this fixes a run that’s too small
Here’s the unglamorous bit, and it’s the one that actually matters.
If your birds are crowded, enrichment is a plaster. The usual guideline is 8 to 10 square feet of run per bird. Under that and you’ll be fighting behaviour problems that no cabbage is going to fix.
When mine started pecking I added toys first. It helped a bit.
What ended it was making the run bigger.
So go and count your square footage before you buy anything. Then hang the cabbage.
