Chicken feeder

I think I now know why our first rooster was so 'ornery'.  Our second rooster has been trying to 'attack' RMan - who defends himself with a well aimed kick with a sturdy boot, which has never made contact, but certainly shoo's the bird away.

I tried to wait until the last moment in the day
to feed the wild birds, but even then the chickens
were coming back to see what they could scrounge
before they hit the coop for the night.

The blooming chickens seem to be perpetually ravenous - even to the point of chasing the wild birds away so that they can eat the food which I throw for them every evening.

Perhaps the rooster and chickens aren't getting enough and they are hungry, I thought?  It doesn't seem logical, because they are 100% unrestrictedly free-ranging as well as being given a small amount of breakfast (a mixture of corn pieces, pearl barley, sunflower seeds, red lentils and laying pellets) when they are released from the coop in the morning, and a slightly larger amount for dinner before they are safely ensconced in their coop for the night.

So I decided to research chicken feeders that I could leave in the coop for them to help themselves to whenever they felt like it, but that wouldn't also feed / encourage the field mice.

I have seen various chicken feeders floating around blogosphere.  And all, except the 'stand on and open lid" one, seemed to be vulnerable to feeding the local rodent population.

And then I saw one that seriously appealed to me.

So, with RMan's help we set about sorting it up.

It entails a thoroughly cleaned, recycled 25lt bucket (left over from when we painted the house) and two drain pipe corners.

I tend to fill up the bucket so that the tops of the
drainpipe corners are covered.  That amount of food
 lasts the chickens for a week - in addition to their
 free ranging all day long.

After cutting a suitably sized hole in the paint bucket, the drain pipe corners were placed facing down in the new openings, leaving a 2.5 - 3.0 cm space between the base of the paint bucket and the lowest point of the drain pipe corner, and they were then siliconed into place.  That 2 - 3 cm gap will allow the food to continuously fall within reach of the internal drain pipe corner opening / chickens hungry mouths.

As I filled the feeder bucket for the first time,
 and before I had chance to place it in their
 coop, they all crowded round.  Munching took
place in the normal pecking order.

The bucket was then suspended from the roof and placed on two bricks to give it "pecking stability" - I didn't want any overly eager chickens knocking another one out with a swinging bucket lol.  Within 15 minutes of placing the new 24 / 7 feeder in place, the chickens were already inspecting it / filling their stomachs.

The one chick couldn't wait to get it's
head into the feed bucket.  Shoving
their heads relatively deep inside the bucket
 doesn't seem to bother them at all.
The bricks / height also ensure that the
 field mice can't access the bucket nor
 it's contents.

The beauty if this system is that the chicken heads are so far inside the bucket that they don't make any mess whatsoever.  So, there is no attracting rodents to munch on the mess and take up residence in the chicken coop :)

The bricks are under the bucket for stability
 and do not provide easy access for rodents to
 get to the food - too high for them to jump
 without having a non-slippery surface to
 land on.  Plus, they cannot access the food
 from the top either - again, too slippery :)

Serendipitously, the rooster has lost his aggression...! :)

How much additional food are they consuming?  Over a week it is roughly twice the amount that I used to feed them in a single day - i.e. 8 days worth of food over 7 days.  So, no great increase in feed costs, and, by way of thank you, all five of the chickens are now laying :D