Bird ‘Flu

In a fit of fantastic timing, within a fortnight of us buying The Girls, a farm was found to hae the H5N1 strain of bird ‘flu. Luckily it was about 20 miles away, so we fall well outside the 10km ‘surveillance zone’ that was put in place – and so also was the place that we’d bought The Girls from, which also made life a lot easier.

As it is, they’re settling in well in their new home. I still need to put up a bit of shelter over their food and water trays – we could leave them inside the coop, but for the moment haven’t done so. I’ll probably sort out some cover/shelter for them on Wednesday when I’m working from home.

Of course, if we’d been in this surveillance zone, the birds would have been supposed to be kept inside their coop (or outside so long as it was covered, and wild birds couldn’t get any access) along with their food and water, which isn’t a situation I’d be overly happy about. The coop we bought is actually suitable (apparently) for up to four birds, so it’s big enough, but still not something I’d have been happy about. As it is, we bought the chickens because we want them to trot about, even if “only” within the limits of their run, and had/have no desire to keep them confined further. Fortunately, we haven’t had to do this, but if we had I would’ve put up some tarpaulin (something we seem to have loads of) as cover, and still let them get on with their daily business.

We still haven’t decided whether to put ourselves on the DEFRA register of poultry owners – we don’t need to, as we’re nowhere near being commercial bird owners/dealers, nor do we have more than 50 birds (Bloody hell fifty birds in our place? That’d be a nightmare) but we could sign up voluntarily. It would mean that we get rapid and up-to-date information aout bird flu, but at the same time it means that DEFRA would know where to come in order to go through with a cull…

Still we’ll see. For the moment I think we’ll be sticking with how we’re currently doing it, as it all seems to be running smoothly so far. We moved the coop over the weekend as they’d covered their area of run during the two weeks we’ve had them – and there’s a lot more garden and veg patch for them to cover before we have to go back to the place they’ve already dealt with so I think they’ll be good for a fair while yet.