Quote: Rilly. Well, no hawk is going to keep me out of my own yard. How stupid, regulations or not. Sheesh. Sometimes, this stuff is taken to a ridiculous extreme, I'm afraid. I'm not advocating anything here, but wow, how unhelpful he was.
I always used neon colored nylon mason's line crisscrossed over pens, never fishing line, which would be heck to deal with. The nylon string lasts for years. And never line alone, but we hung CD's from it, which dance and throw flashes/reflections all over in a breeze. It messes their dive up. I've been semi blinded by a flash from those in bright sunlight myself on occasion since they're like little mirrors swinging and dancing all around. Never had a hawk come into a pen with these in play, though in truth, we've never lost one to a hawk in all the years we had chickens, even free ranging on our mountain property. Part of that are the roosters, part is they have good cover from leyland cypress, hemlock and rhododendron that we planted over the years in winter and all the oaks in addition to that in spring/summer/fall.
I always used neon colored nylon mason's line crisscrossed over pens, never fishing line, which would be heck to deal with. The nylon string lasts for years. And never line alone, but we hung CD's from it, which dance and throw flashes/reflections all over in a breeze. It messes their dive up. I've been semi blinded by a flash from those in bright sunlight myself on occasion since they're like little mirrors swinging and dancing all around. Never had a hawk come into a pen with these in play, though in truth, we've never lost one to a hawk in all the years we had chickens, even free ranging on our mountain property. Part of that are the roosters, part is they have good cover from leyland cypress, hemlock and rhododendron that we planted over the years in winter and all the oaks in addition to that in spring/summer/fall.
This is an older thread but the information is still pertinent. I don't have a pond but did have fishing lines over my pens but a Great Horned owl managed to get through and kill some birds. I have some coops that are open on one side. Since I put netting up and only had one issue because I ran short so put up some crappy netting over the part I didn't have enough good netting for thinking it would probably deter any aerial predators. An owl went through the crappy netting and killed some birds. I moved the birds to another coop and pen and put a camera up and the owl came back and went through the netting again. I got some good netting and put it up and the owl tried to go through the netting but this time got stuck. We managed to get it into a cage and a wildlife rescue came and got it.
So far so good. We have had a problem with hawks, losing one chicken while I was standing right there with a backpack blower! 
I did see an egret try to get in once, but it was very confused by the fishing line. We live in Florida and many of the neighborhoods with community pools use fishing line to keep birds from using the pool. There are a LOT of birds in Florida!
