My husband and I are totally at a loss. HELP!

[whiteybird]

Hannah, I'm really sorry to hear about your birds, but also really happy for you that they made it out alive, if a little worse for the wear! I am pretty new to chicken raising also, and unfortunately have had some terrible experiences with several predators that didn't end up so well

On chicken doors: my boyfriend and I bought the 'Poultry Butler' chicken coop door, which also has a light sensor for dawn/dusk operation, because we were sick and tired of opening and closing the coop every morning and night. No offense to our birds, because I can totally understand why being cooped up (pun intended) is cause for a loud ruckus in the morning, but finding a way to let us sleep in and let them out as soon as they wished seemed like the perfect solution. NTM when we'd go on trips, it'd be a lot easier for someone to bird sit for us.

DONT BUY the Poultry Butler door. The first few times we used it it closed too early and we came home from a night out to find all six birds lined up on the ladder leading to the door and a bunch of raccoons on the ground around them eating their food. After a few more months of operation using a timer instead, and it stopped closing. Apparently with this door the cord gets twisted and, I am not joking, the instructions tell you to partially dismantle the door in order to unwind the string. Then it stopped moving the door altogether. We took it apart and found out the cord ripped off the motor. We fixed that, then the screw holding the motor to the door stripped. We fixed that. We sent an email through the website and still (8 months later) have yet to get any kind of acknowledgement. I wish we had found the ADOR model before we bought this one! 10xmama, thanks for that.

On raccoons: After our/the chickens' first encounter with coons we thought wed be ok, though we were still wary of them. We (the bf) shot a few which we (I) then buried, and we released several down the highway. We've read that the reason why you cant relocate them is a) it has to be far enough that they cant find their way back (a mile maybe?) and b) if you put them in another coons territory it's as good as dead anyway. I've decided that if they cause issues and you can't keep them out, shoot them. I am a huge animal lover - I swore I'd be a vet when I was little - but they have cost me food and messes and now chickens. Pets.

I would like to note that these raccoons were strong enough to tear apart the privacy lattice we use to enclose the bottom of our coop. I found the hollowed out corpses of our EE mix Eagle and our mutt Butters when I went to let everyone out this morning. I'm posting a new thread about it with a picture in a few.

So...don't use privacy lattice I guess. Definitely use hardware cloth, though welded wire (~2"x4" openings) works too. Good luck in the future!

 

[donrae]

Quote: I believe it's illegal to trap and relocate animals like that. Plus, a mile is so not far enough. I'm thinking 20 miles and over a major highway MIGHT do it. Those raccoons you released "down the highway" probably beat you back home.

 

[HannahSmith2013]

We've actually started some renovations today to protect them. Double fencing everything and possibly a net if we can find one today. We don't have a live trap and don't know anyone around here that would let us borrow one. We might just buckle and go buy one today. I'm almost 100% positive that it isn't dog only because I can't see a physical way of them getting the pen. We have hog wire fencing all the way around the pen and it's up to 6 1/2 feet tall. At the top of the fence, my husband bent it over to create a "curve in" so that the chickens wouldn't roost on it during the day. (We had one do that and it fell and broke it's wing). So, I don't really see how a dog could be getting in without digging it way in or at least without some indentation in the fencing. Whatever it is has to either be small enough to fit through the edge of the gate and the coop or it has to be able to climb very well.

My husband and I red that a fox could jump and clear, easily, a 6ft fence. This would explain how it could have gotten in (jumping over the fence) but not how it's getting out. The curve at the top of our fence, there is just no way I could see it jumping over it from the inside of the pen.

Another thing, our nesting boxes stick out of the side of the coop. They are covered with tin roofing (the same roofing that's one the top of the coop). The nesting boxes are about 3 1/2 feet off of the ground and it's about 1 1/2 foot from the top of the nesting boxes to the top of the coop. From there, anything could just jump right in. What is baffling us, is how it's getting back out. The front of our chicken coop has the ramp going down out of it. Where the ramp meets the door of the coop, we have a combo of chicken wire/hog wire at the of the coop hanging over the door and the top of the ramp. We did this when we got some barred rock hens because they kept standing at the top of the ramp and flying over the top of the pen. Now, if something is jumping onto the nesting boxes, to the the top of the coop, into the pen, onto the ramp and into the coop....I could see that BUT I don't see how it could jump back over the fencing. I'm just really confused.


Both times we saw NO sign of any tracks or digging or anything.

 

[balbrt1]

I had rabbits and show rabbits for years. If you had welded wire for walls and 1/2 in wire it is not a coon. A big old boar might try to get at them but if your pen was 2x4 boards a coon is not that strong. My Dad coon hunted all my life and I even had pet coons at times. You would be looking at a dog, coyote, bobcat. You should have seen some kind of prints. Around your rabbit pen. Now your chickens are a different story. We have welded wire on our run outside along bottom and top we have an electric fence

 

[whiteybird]

right, i think its illegal in part because you're sending them to their death, by other coons. NTM youre giving your problem to someone else...kind of like littering on someone elses property.

we were half an hour from home on our way to see family...probably 15+mi away. we did let one baby coon go maybe a mile away before we realized you dumb that was.

 

[HannahSmith2013]

I would just like to update! After another attack on our babies, we decided to rehome them because we didn't feel like we could protect them. We continued to leave our trap set inside the coop and about a week after we rehomed them, we caught a HUGE, FAT opossum. So, we are certain that's what it was. We killed the opossum and haven't had any problems since then!