A sticky situation, hard line
So has been the case lately, last night was again very chicken-centric. The majority of the chickens went into the coop themselves, about half them got right up on the perch like they should. Well then Lucy went into the coop and the fireworks began. On Sunday night Lucy was content to sit in one of the nesting boxes all night while the babies mostly occupied the perching area. Well last night she decided she was going to be claiming a perch.
As soon as Lucy hopped on the perches the other chicks got very nervous as they now associate Lucy with pecks on the head and back. Lucy immediately started poking at any chicks within reach. Some of the babies jumped off the perch while others just moved away out of pecking range. As some of the chickens were trying to get off the perch they were utilizing the side frame of the perch. They were sliding/falling off, adding to the chaos.
Well one of the babies, Kristen, was scared off the perch by Lucy’s tactics. She is a good flyer, as she jumped she flew up into the air. As she did she collided with one of many fly strips Cindy had hanging in the coop. Somehow Lucy also managed to get another strip stuck on her. There was a flurry of chicken panic as those strips are almost like super glue. Cindy corralled Kristen and I got a hold of Lucy, something neither of us had ever done before. Slowly we peeled the strips off the birds. Cindy used the hand sanitizer we had in the coop to help dissolve the adhesive. Obviously sticky fly strips are not going to be a good thing in the coop although neither Cindy or I gave any thought to the possibility of the scenario that went down last night.
Lucy continued scaring a lot of the chicks. At one point Cindy was sitting down and had three or four chickens on her lap or arm, viewing her as safety. It was very cute. Despite the sun rapidly setting I wanted to try to quickly address the problem with the chicks sliding off the frame of the perch. I quickly cut some small pieces of wood and attached them to both sides of the frame in between the perch locations, allowing the birds to climb up or get down from the perches in a more controlled manner.
As it got darker and darker in the coop things settled down. There were a total of 9 birds on the perches with Lola, Jaina, and Kristen on the ground. When we watched via the infrared web cam it looked like the chicks all fell asleep. Lucy appeared to be awake and alert, hopefully she got at least some sleep during the night.
As I mentioned we have been trying to monitor the coop via the two wireless web cams we have in the coop. The wifi signal strength out in the shed is marginal at best. Sometimes we can get a steady feed but other times it won’t connect at all. I began thinking about how much better it would be if I had a 1 gigabit hard line in the coop. Not only would the web cams work flawlessly, I could even install a 4 camera dvr system out there, allowing us to monitor the inside and outside of the coop. Is this even remotely necessary? No, but it would be undeniably cool.
I already investigated bury rated ethernet cable., which I could get in long lengths, up to 200 feet. The only remaining challenge would be how I would get the hard line routed from inside the house to outside in some manner that doesn’t involve drilling a hole through a wall. When the house was built I actually ran some cat5E cable from the office to the utility panel in the garage which in turn could possibly be fished out the conduit where phone/cable comes in. I would need to do some digging around to see what exactly I can do. If I can get the cable out of the structure then it is just a matter of some grunt work which costs nothing but time.