Chickens' eyesight and chicken wire

[ElephantsStreetParty]

Does anyone know how good chickens' eyesight is? I ask as I need to prevent my buns eating the hens' food, and I thought about putting the food in a shallow tray and cover it with chicken wire, so the hens can reach through and get the food but my buns can't. The only thing is that I'm worried about the hens hurting themselves on the wire. Can I presume they'll see it and avoid the wire?

I wouldn't as they might catch an eye on it,

you could get an old kitchen table, make a peg ladder(one long bit of wood with dowel sticking out each side) , the chucks will go up but the rabbits will not be able to.

you teach them by putting food on each peg, once one or two have done it, the others watch and follow. If you put them on the table to show them the food is there, lots of lovely scraps,they soon will get up, they are jungle birds.

we use peg ladders so that all chickens put themselves away at night, high coops, we have them on a pin and loop, so the weight of the chicken doesn't effect them, but a fox will tip over.

Their eyesight is excellent and I think they can see ultraviolet too. There is an article on the web somewhere.

quote - that's genius! How high are your coops? don't suppose you've got a photo I can dribble over?

I don't have any handy, and don't want to out myself too much, but this is how we approached the problem,

I was first asked by a client to come up with a solution as they were often very late home,

we made a large cube, with a sloped roof, we used galvanised steel sheeting, insulated with triso , internally industrial fridge panelling, at the back lower sloped side, we had access panels to get to boxes, with dowel perches across front and side,

we set four large 9/9 posts in the ground, on the cube we added large industrial hook eyes, to each corner, the cube was placed in between the posts, on each post we put a line of industrial hook eyes, with locking boats cleats at the bottom(we got most of the kit from our local chandlers, which has a second hand section)

we use a flex cable with carabiner clipped onto each of the bottom corner of cube, cable goes up the side of the cube, then down the poles,

on the front we added another hook eye, below the door, made very long pole with random small dowel running up each side, add L shaped pin to end of pole, rest the L into hook eye on house,

every day crank house up a foot, the hens start off on the floor, and move up, cube can come up and down easily, jet washable, we have a back step for getting eggs easily,so we only get house down for cleaning,

we have done various versions, I came up with a system that meant you could have it all on one hand winch, go and chat up the local chandlers, they love a good design challenge,

we grow things up the posts to help soften them, they look brilliant within two years,

here is one idea

another