On Sunday, the second-last day of the school holidays, my Dad and I decided to build a temporary small chookpen. We do have one already, however that was meant to be the temporary one (and it was built after we had pulled down the original one in preparation) but it’s small and the chooks had eaten every living thing in it.
We chose the area down near the house pad back fence, which has a sort of round shape with bamboo and lots of thick grass in it. First of all Dad put the metal wire support poles up, then we unravelled the wire that we were going to use. Some of it was so tangled up with grass that I had to use the ride-on mower to pull it out!
The first side of the pen that we put up was running parallel with the house pad fence, and that was easy because we just lent the wire against the existing barb wire and wrapped a few pieces of wire around it so that it didn’t fall.
On the left is the house pad fence which is the back of the temporary chookpen.
After that we got out the higher wire and started from the northern side of the pen (behind the photo above) and wrapped it around the metal posts in an arc shape. That wire went nearly all the way around, but stopped just right of the above photo so that an entrance could be made.
The third and last wire that was put up went from where the 2nd wire stopped, and stopped in the middle of the above photo. There it joined up with the first wire that we placed.
The chookpen was finished! Now they have somewhere to scratch away the day. The main chookpen is only 20m away, so we don’t have very far to carry them 
.
A happy chook.
The bamboo and grass area. The chooks love sitting in there to hide.
