Creating & Building an Aviary

[Senegal's & Budgie's]

Hello,

I'm thinking about building an aviary for my and my , but have one question how would I defend the aviary from cats and owls? We have many cats in our community and Im worried that a cat might try to get to one of the birds, I'm scared of the cat stalking and stressing the birds out or some how getting to the birds... I know thick wire and elevated nesting box might help... but then comes the owl problem, one of my neighbors owns a and she but the in the wood trimmed and wire aviary and went back into the house and came back a hour later (it was around sunset) and an owl chewed up one of the thick wood support beams and opened the wire and got to the smaller bird and killed and ate the poor little . I would simply die if this happened to any of my birds... But I don't want to use metal support beams for several reasons, it looks horrible (prison like) and it would raise the $ cost and wouldn't really blends an look natural, what should I do to help secure the aviary if built?

[Michael]

A) Never put a Senegal and a Budgie in the same aviary at the same time
B) Build aviary within an aviary for best protection.

In other words build your main bird aviary out of proper safe materials. Then using cheaper stuff like chicken wire and poles, you can run that around the aviary (at least 1ft away) to surround it. So the inner aviary is to keep your birds in and the outer enclosure to keep the wildlife out. Never feed or leave food in the aviary cause that attracts even more trouble. Also make sure to run wire mesh underneath the aviary too to keep burrowers out.