Last week, while peering out the window and playing with my new toy, a new binocular night-scope, I was startled to see a fox curled up fast asleep not 3 meters from our fencing and a meal of chickens. So, bearing in mind we live close to the foxes’ habitat and they are such opportunistic hunters, that it was time to fortify the chicken area in time for winter, when hungry foxes become bold.  We live in a rural area, and although rural foxes do tend to be less bold then their city cousins, they are around during the day. We have a wood bordering part of the land so we decided on a more permanent approach; we currently use poultry netting, but felt it was time for something more robust and permanent around the perimeter keeping the netting for regular moves.

We started by banging in wooden poles, around 3 meters apart, then attaching black ring insulators which screw into the poles, these are important, we didn’t want the wires connecting with the wood and shorting the fence, rendering it ineffective. Worth noting that you can buy a drill adaptor that fits onto the insulator, very useful as it’s hard work on the wrists otherwise, specially as we had decided on a 6 wire over 450 metres total length – that is an awful lot of insulators!  Another tip if thinking of installing electric fencing, make sure you buy specialist steel wire on a reel otherwise you will get into all sorts of bother with the wire turning into a birds nest as it unravels.  When we had finished the wiring, we attached inline strainers to ensure the correct tautness of the wire and prevent sagging making sure we did not make it so tight that we could play a guitar solo on the fence plus we did not want poles flying out of the ground under the tension! Finally, we hitched the energiser onto the fence ( ensuring the earth stake was nice and deep this one was 1m) attached the charged up leisure battery and hey presto - It worked!!!

What a way to spend a weekend, fixing fencing, well at least the weather was lovely! 

Foxes natural habitat is woodland, scrub, anywhere where there is an abundance of the foxes natural diet which consists mainly of small mammals, bugs and hedgerow berries, this accounts for the typical black sticky texture of fox droppings.

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