We splurged a little and bought a contraption for the hen house. Total price tag was $44. We'll see if it works. It is a solar powered chicken coop door. It opens at sunrise and closes at sunset. The current arrangement goes like this: At night after all the chickens are roosting in the hen house, I go and close the door so that the minks don't kill all of them. After they killed 39 in total, we've finally built the flock back up to 40 in total. Each morning, we go back out to the barn and open the door to the hen house so that they can run around on 3 acres and forage for bugs, worms and grass.
This is not a new invention - I remember my friend in Hathaway had one of these on his hen house many years ago. I was impressed with it. It was delivered to the door yesterday and today after work, I got the instructions out and began the installation process.
I took the existing hen house door off and took measurements, using the old adage, "Measure twice, cut once." It fit like a hand in a glove. I began screwing everything in place and brought the charging apparatus inside to charge with electricity since it would soon be getting dark. Tonight, we'll manually close it once its charged and then tomorrow we'll begin the automatic sunrise open and sunset close feature.
It's about 6:30 pm and some of the girls are checking out the new door. "How's this gonna work?" The opening is four times smaller than it used to be. Will they figure it out? I'm sure it will, but after it gets dark, we'll check and see if they all made it in.
It's 9:30 pm and we went out and manually closed the door. Let's check in and see if they all made their way in to roost:
They did! The hens and roosters are all up on their roosts and ready to call it a night. As am I. Good night everyone!
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