Plague of mice in the chicken enclosure

As already mentioned, I am the proud mum of 4 lovely chickens. I really have a lot of fun with them. Not only do they constantly make me laugh with their behaviour, they also lay a fresh egg almost every day.

Two years ago, we suddenly had a rat problem in the chicken enclosure. Unfortunately, we were also attracting mice and rats to the enclosure with our daily leftovers, which are a treat for the chickens.

The straw that broke the camel's back was a whole family of rats that cheekily came out of their holes after dark, when the chickens were already in the coop, and devoured the rest of the food on the ground and in the storage container with relish. They even jumped onto our 10 litre water bucket and drank the fresh water in peace.

That was the end of the fun. Not only do I not even count mice among my favourite animals, but rats were a pain in the neck, especially as they were multiplying like crazy. I turned to professional help and luckily we got rid of the rats quickly.

Fortunately, this problem was the first time in 10 years and hopefully it will stay that way!

Our neighbours have very cute dwarf silk chickens and have also complained about their mice problem since they started having chickens.

To get rid of this problem, they rebuilt their chicken enclosure and even had an excavator come in to remove a 10 cm layer of soil to lay a mouse grid on top so that no rodents could get through from the ground.

The whole thing was quite time-consuming and I doubted that this would solve the mouse problem.

The neighbours recently sent us a cute photo of a mouse: They had caught 3 small mice in a live cage. There were 3 of these cages in the small chicken enclosure. So nothing to do with mouse guards!

The mice found their way through the soil next to the fenced chicken enclosure and happily hopped over to the chickens to eat.

I couldn't help but smile. The different chicken grains attract various rodents in winter.

At least the mice can survive. We have plenty of fields in the neighbourhood where they can dig new tunnels.

I have drawn the consequences from this: leftover food is no longer scattered around the chicken enclosure. And the grains they do get are placed at a safe height in feed troughs so that mice and rats can no longer reach them so easily. It's working so far!