A Secure Loft

[WhiteWingsCa]

This also came up inside another thread -- and again, I feel is important.

CHICKEN WIRE is NOT adequate wire to keep out preditors and other problems.

1. The holes in chicken wire are large enough to permit rats and mice and small birds into the loft. All three can and will spread disease to your birds. Rats love to eat eggs, babies, and youngsters on the floor.

2. Cats can rip through chicken wire like it is paper. I've seen it -- we put up a 'run' for our cats once, to protect them from the great outdoors (and protect the great outdoors from them LOL). Within a day, they'd shredded the wire and made their escape. (these were young cats, only 6 months old, so not even fully grown and at full strength).

3. Raccoons would just pooh-pooh chicken wire, and either rip it off the loft, or tear through it. Raccoons LOVE pigeon for supper. And once they've found that meal in your loft, they will be back night after night.

Hardware cloth -- with 4 squares to the inch -- is the safest -- keeps out everything but the bugs.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

As well, raccoons can open most simple latches. They can slide open those doors on rollers. Open ended hooks? You might as well not even bother closing the door.....

We use latches that have the loops for locks on them -- and put a clip on the loops when we're home (like the kind on dog's leashes), and a lock when we're going out -- for the two legged varmints.

ALL hooks in our lofts -- whether on the aviary doors, the inner doors, the trap, etc -- are the spring loaded kind -- where you have to pull a small latch back off the hook end in order to lift the hook off the eye.

If you're going to take on the responsiblity of having pigeons, please be responsible enough to make sure that they are as safe as possible. A poor defenseless pigeon in a dark loft at night is an easy meal for cats, raccoons, rats, possums and weasels, if not in a safe enclosure.

[Trees Gray]

I'm curious as to what gage the hardware cloth is that your talking about-(the 4 squares to an inch)?

Treesa

[turkey]

Thank you again Janine. A very good and important point.

I believe she is talking about the 1/2 inch hardware cloth. You get 4 squares per inch.

It confused me in the beginning.

Julie

[This message has been edited by turkey (edited January 31, 2004).]

[WhiteWingsCa]

Treesa, Julie is right -- we use 1/2" g.

I can never remember for sure what it's called -- I just know what it looks like whenever I go to buy some