Excellent article. Sadly, I am reading it AFTER I lost more than half my flock this summer to one young raccoon. At least, that's all I was able to trap. I learned a lot about tightening up the coop (ended up building a coop within a pole barn rather than just letting them live in the pole barn). I will invest in the hardware cloth as right now I just used chicken fencing in the upper third of my coop.
