The new turkey pen Works (mostly)

Who says you cant contain heritage turkeys?!?!


Well, its partially true.


We are having decent success so far. About a month ago we finished work on the large turkey hoop house (its 14x16), build from 4 cattle panels, 2  16' pressure treated skids, a few 2x4, and lots of chicken wire.  I still need to post the pics of the construction.


The first step was to get the turkeys to stay in the coop happily. After repairing the damage from the sheep (see an earlier blog post) the hoop house was finally working well. The turkeys stayed inside the hoop house for about 2 weeks day and night. I moved it around the pasture once or twice a day. Then we added a nesting / storage box inside. That caused a little problem because the turkeys would stand and walk on the nesting box, making quite the mess and smell. This brought us to pursue the next step.. true pasture raising.


I have a plan for the sheep /. turkey pasture to split it into thirds with electric lines and rotate the water, sheep, and turkeys across the three paddocks. Not knowing much about containing flying birds with short fences, it seemed prudent to experiment on a smaller scale first.


Attempt one failed miserably! I tried the fiberglass straight posts and half inch braided electric fencing wire. I put 2 strands of wire across about a foot apart. This was driven by a solar powered fence charger.  Unfortunately the turkeys saw the big spaces and would run up and right through the wire without getting zapped at all!  That was obviously not going to work.


Attempt two was with the rigid plastic posts that had molded in wire holders and metal spikes at the bottom. This allows much closer spacing. with a wire every few inches, the birds were cautious about e jumping through and when the y got close it would zap them  successfully! after a few minutes the birds were "contained" successfully.


This lasted for about 3 days perfectly. On the third night I watered them late and noticed the feeder was low but didn't want to take the time to refill it in the dark so I left it. On the fourth day, when we were heading out to check on them, the birds saw me coming and immediately took to the air and flew right over the electric fence to get to me! They were hungry! Fortunately they followed right back and happily gobbled the food I brought.


this showed me that while it is possible to contain heritage turkeys in a pen with 3 foot fences, it only works when they are happy! If they get spooked or hungry or unhappy for any particular reason, they will easily fly out.  This still seems manageable, and I am considering changing to the 4 foot posts with more strands of wire when we build the paddocks. For now, they are happily contained in their pen once again.


As a side note, These birds LOVE greens! all the grass inside the pen has just about been eaten in 3 days. They actually prefer green fresh grass to the "perfect" bird food. I hope we can get the grass growing thicker soon and the pasture finished so that can have all the fresh grass they want!