Cornish Cross Alcatraz

Just finished this poultry pen and populated it with my first 10 meat birds. (I've got a totally different pen and coop elsewhere for the eggers).

At 600 square feet, it's way oversized for only 10 cornish cross chickens, but the plan is to get a few turkeys and a larger flock of meat chickens later.

The pen is made of pressure treated posts 2' deep in concrete, H-posts at the corners.

The fencing is buried almost a foot deep, and consists of:

• 3' tall 1/2" hardware cloth on the lower half
• 6' tall 2×4 welded wire
• Cattle panels on the lower 2/3rds.
• 3 rows of hotwire (only 1.5 rows show in photo, I ran out of wire before I was done lol)

There is also bird netting stretched over the whole thing. The tarps are stretched over some very basic trusses I constructed, with the assumption that someday I might build a proper roof on it.

The gate is just a basic chainlink gate, that I reinforced with a bunch of welded wire and hardware cloth, and at some point maybe cattle panel too (I was starting to worry about the weight, so I didn't put that on yet). The threshold under the gate is buried cinderblocks filled with concrete.

There's no coop, really. I blew all my budget (and then some) on the rest of it. So these birds get a repurposed dog kennel for the time being, which I wrapped with some of that reflective bubble wrap stuff from Home Depot. My hope is that the pen will keep predators out well enough that they don't need a really nice coop, and they're getting butchered in a month anyways. But until then, they seem to be really enjoying their new life out there! It's a bummer that this breed can't survive long because they're actually really sweet and fun, and love people. I've had to resist the urge to get attached to any of them.