For weeks — even before our shipment of chicks arrived — I have been reading about the perils of being a chicken. And there are many. However, our brood will not face most of the horrors about which I have lately learned simply because of its size. As with any animal, high population density encourages health and social/behavioral problems. It’s true for people. It’s true for chickens.
So our chickens are unlikely to suffer from Marek’s Disease (though we got them vaccinated just in case), or any number of other ailments that chickens kept by the thousands in industrial feed houses suffer from and that necessitate their daily doses of medication. Our chickens are unlikely to cannibalize one another, or gang up on and peck a smaller chicken to death, or isolate a disliked chicken and prevent it from feeding until it starves to death — as happens with chickens that are not provided adequate personal space. It’s extremely unlikely that they will peck each other till they bleed out of boredom, as birds in featureless environments where they can’t range around and scratch for part of their meal tend to do.
However, one threat we cannot control is the behavior of other predators that like to eat chicken and eggs as much as we do. Absent an indiscriminate aerial bombardment of our neighborhood with pesticides and herbicides that would make Rachel Carson blanch, there will be predators and they will try to eat our chickens. The prime candidates in our area are hawks, skunks, opossums, raccoons, and coyotes (though I’m not convinced the latter can get into our yard).
Our chickens will range during the day when the hawks are out, and we have done what we can to give the chickens a fighting chance by ordering breeds that will blend in with our environment and that are fairly alert and self-sufficient. We are also growing flower beds and other cover that the birds can hide out in when something’s overhead.
The real threat will come at night according to the troubling anecdotes I’ve heard from local keepers and from the warnings I’ve read: raccoons that will pull a chicken’s leg through the chicken wire and bite it off, raccoons that can figure out latches and locks, opossums that dig their way into the coop to eat the abdomen out of a chicken and leave the rest, and skunks that tunnel in, too, and eat the heads.
Such tales have already had me modifying the coop. I offset a second layer of chicken wire around the entire structure to a height of two feet to prevent reaching in. I complicated the latches and locks (but I’ll probably test this measure out on my neighbor’s kid, because if a toddler can figure it out, a raccoon can). I buried layers of dried out, razor sharp bougainvillea stalks to eight inches deep around the coop borders. And I am planting defensively, installing thorny berry vines and pineapple plants along the exposed lengths of the hen house.
But will it be enough? There’s really no way to know until it’s not.
Because we’re not varmint exterminators, nor insect or weed eradicators, and because we try to live a more permaculturally-minded existence, we feel we also have to be realistic about our chickens and their survivability. We have always wanted three chickens. Two would be too few. And it seems like a distinct possibility that we’ll lose at least one to the success of some hunting animal that earned it.
So, long story long — we got ourselves another chick. We bought a week-or-so-old Dominique from Kahoots on Monday, so she’s about the same age as our brood. We were pleased to see the other birds signal their acceptance of the little Dominique by cleaning her off upon her arrival. Our birds have grown fast in the last two weeks, sprouting feathers almost immediately, making short flights at 10 days, roosting. They’re friendly with us at this point, and will sit in our hands or perch on our fingertips without trying to escape.
And they’ve all got names now, too: Bailey (Rhode Island Red, reddish), Justin (Buff Orpington, yellow), Seven (Barred Rock, black and yellow/white), and Kate (Dominique, smallish black).
We’d hate to lose any of them.
My brother used to keep doves and once while perched next to the edge of the dove cage a crow came in and bit her head off from jst outside. I would recommend a chicken wire barrier anywhere a chicken’s head might come close to the inner wire.
Lookin good Justin! : )
I hope they all make it. Once they get bigger they should be mostly good right? My grandma, who raised countless chickens back in the day, told me that chickens are big enough that cats won’t mess with them. If they’re too big for cats surely they’re too big for hawks?
Cats aren’t really a problem here because the coyotes have kept most cats inside and eaten the one’s that have been let out, but I agree that a 6 – 8 pound chicken should be able to deter a house cat. Hawks, though …
Mike — crows, really? Damn. The whole coop is outfitted with chicken wire, but the double wire is only up to two feet from the bottom to keep out the grabbing raccoons. I guess if one of my chickens lets a noisy, big black crow close enough to bite her head off through the wire, that might be a little bit of the natural selection I was alluding to.
Aaaah! So cute. I want chickens! I shall enjoy living vicariously through you and getting updates on them.
Actually, Marek’s is more common than you might think in unvaccinated backyard flocks. It’s good that your chicks are vaccinated, as a little extra insurance. We’re also vaccinating our new birds that arrive March 29th.
As for predators, we had many of the same concerns as you. I recently wrote a post about the considerations we made when building our first coop:
http://curbstonevalley.com/blog/?p=1267
Those hens are now three years old, and despite seeing bobcats climb the outside of the run in broad daylight, and numerous coyotes walking through, nothing has made it into that coop. We’re in the woods here, so predators abound, but so far we’ve managed to keep our flock safe. Hawks haven’t bothered our birds, although they do fly and circle overhead sometimes while the girls are free-ranging.
As for raccoons…we use a lot of spring catches on our coop and slide bolts. If the latch is a two part mechanism (like hold back the spring and lift up the latch) raccoons have a much harder time figuring those out. I hope our post is a little helpful, at least in regards to what we’ve managed to keep out!
We’ve no issues with pecking/cannabalism, and unless you overstock your coop, you’re highly unlikely to have those issues. Good luck with your girls! They’re growing fast!
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