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Can you get a second coop for those ones? Or even just a lockable dog crate to put them in at night?

Thank you so much. I miss them loads, so have hatched some chicks and hopefully will get some more girls to bolster the flock.

I'm in the UK so we don't have possums or raccoons here. But thank you for your ideas, perhaps that info will help someone else. I have a trail camera, it's a good idea. So far only benign animals have featured on the camera, plus some cats. I'm still stumped.

I've got a trail camera set up and all it caught were wild birds and domestic cats. It might have been a cat that did it. No weasels or similar caught on camera. I set a trap down but it didn't catch anything after a week so I stopped putting it down.

That's interesting to know, thank you. And how awful 😔. Was the gap the sort of space a rat could squeeze through?

Thanks for that article. I've read that mustelids also do this, and I think it unlikely an owl would walk inside a coop through a pop door and drag out 4 chickens. It seems more mammalian behaviour to me. Owls hunt in open space.

No, but they are the same family as mink and weasels, which we do have here apparently.

This cat looked a bit mangey with some bald patches so I wondered if it was a farm cat, used to hunting. I did read that taking the heads was a typical weasel/mink/stoat modus operandi. I have put some motion sensor lights out there, so hopefully that will scare off anything that prefers to...

This is so far the only possible culprit that the camera has seen.

Thanks everyone for your replies. I set up a large humane animal trap but it caught nothing. I also set up a trail camera and it caught a large cat on camera sniffing the coop door. The bite marks could have been cat mouth sized, but I just can't imagine a cat would have gone into the coop...

To add to my tome, we apparently also have American mink running about wild in the UK. Similar behaviour to stoats. I never knew this!

Thank you. My little boy was distraught, because his favourite Polish have gone, as they are the only flock members who let him pet them, because they were so friendly. One was a white frizzle, and such a ditzy little thing! 😔

I lost 4 of my 8 bantam hens today and I am devastated. 2 Polish, a Wyandotte and a Silver Sussex all dead and my Welsummer is injured. I will try and give as much info as I can, so this is a long post. I need to identify the culprit so I know what, if anything, I can do to save the remaining...