A "what got my chicken" question

[ublyhunter]

Hi,

I've read a few of these posts but don't see something that clearly matches mine.

We have a coop with attached run, with a screen door between coop and run. The coop is three sided hardware cloth with the fourth side a wall to the feed room. The run (and the coop) have a 12" deep (top/bottom) cement footing around the perimeter, about 6" across from interior to exterior. The run is fenced with bull panel fencing that has openings about 2"x3", and across the top I have shade cloth stapled. Since the chickens are closed into the coop at night, I figured the shade cloth was sufficient from the main day predator of hawks.

We forgot to close the door between run and coop for a couple of nights. Tuesday evening I went to shut the coop and was missing a barred rock - I found its remains in the run: there was the beak and skull, and the spine - all one long strip - and nothing else but some feathers.

I closed the door to secure the hens and I left the carcass to retrieve in the morning since it was late and I didn't have tools there to scoop it up. When I came back in the morning, the carcass was gone.

There is a small gap in the shade cloth where it fits around a young tree trunk, and that is the only place I can see that something could come in. There are no holes dug and nothing torn.

Since it only took the one chicken and seemed to be pretty straightforward about eating rather than maiming, I assume it was not a raccoon. I think if it was a daytime hawk attack, it wouldn't have eaten the chicken right there and down to the spine...the legs and ribs would still be there.

We have foxes and possums here but I thought possums didn't eat full grown chickens really.

Any thoughts? We are going to set up a nighttime camera to see what tries to get into the run, and I'm going to secure that patch of the shade cloth - haven't let the hens out into the run during the day yet in case it was a predator that might also come back in the day.

Thanks
Shannon

 

[ublyhunter]

Coon or Opossum

 

[huntersmoon]

Just showing a pic - I had forgotten that the bottom half of the run is wrapped in hardware cloth. I think we'll at least replace the shade cloth with hardware cloth on the top and probably also on the top half of the run, replacing the larger panels.

 

[garp94]

did you ever find out what the predator was???