Beginner chicken owner

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Hello and welcome to BYC! :frow Glad you joined.

I have kept ground predators away from my flock by keeping them behind poultry netting powered with a 10,000 volt/1.3 Joule charger. I have had zero losses from ground predators after having contained them. They have 1/3 acre to roam and the grass is always green and thick.
 
chickins43 said:
Hi everyone! Newbie chicken owner here! We just got chickens in May and have raised them from babies. We started out with 10 hens (or so we thought…they were sexed in the store we bought them from) but we ended up having two grow into roosters! I adopted two more hens from someone in town who was looking for a new home for their chickens so then we had 12. However, We had an unfortunate event while we were gone one day and what we think was a coyote killed 4 of our chickens! (Our best rooster and 3 hens) My daughter was devastated her favorite chickens and her favorite rooster got killed, and we are all sad about it. We are down to 7 hens and 1 rooster. We are working on building a nice enclosure for them that we can keep them in when we are not here to keep an eye on them. Otherwise, they usually roam our backyard and go into their coop at night. We were surprised a coyote got over our wall as most of it is 8 1/2 feet tall but in some areas is only a little over 6ft. We are also thinking of installing coyote rollers on our walls around our property. Has anyone had experience with these and do you know if they work well? Anyways, I am learning fast how to be a chicken doctor as a few of our chickens have had soft eggs break inside of them and have been acting lethargic. I was able to get one back to healthy and acting normal and the other is isolated inside with me right now until she starts looking better. I joined this site because I got some useful information during this time of trying to nurse my chickens back to healthy! Thanks for sharing your knowledge! It helped me save my chickens! ❤️
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Welcome to BYC!! Beautiful pics. 😊
 
What part of the country are you in? You can put your general location in your avatar, then we can know what pests and predators are prevalent in your area and the best methods to stop them.
For example, where I live we have raccoons, coyotes, roaming dogs, weasels, hawks and owls. Over the years we lost one to a weasel and another to a neighbor's dog, but by far our worst predator has been birds of prey. On several occasions, our chickens were free-ranging in broad daylight with us right there! and a hawk swooped down and airlifted a chicken! For this reason, we no longer allow them to free-range, but keep them in a large run with a hardware cloth apron and sides, and poultry wire over the top. We haven't lost any to predators since then!
 
Tookie said:
Hello, and welcome to BYC! We're so glad you joined us! :frow
So sorry for your losses, and good luck with your ill chickens. :hugs

I don't think a coyote could climb walls that high, I'm thinking your losses could've been from a racoon instead, in my opinion. But who knows.
Where were your chickens when you had the attack?
I second using hardware cloth (Make sure to get 1/2".), it's the best thing to use for an enclosed area.
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We are pretty sure it was a coyote because we saw foot prints that looked like a canine print in the area of attack. We live in Las Vegas so we don’t have any raccoons here but maybe bobcat or mountain lion.🤷🏼‍♀️ We are kind of out by the mountains and there is some desert around us although it is all getting developed now. I have seen coyote in our area before and I have heard they can jump 6ft walls and have seen video of it but didn’t think our 8 ft wall they could get over. Our chickens were in our backyard free ranging, and when it happened we were not home at the time. We think they could’ve gotten over one of the areas our wall that is only 6ft high. Whatever it was only left pieces of a few of them and then just killed the other two but didn’t eat it. My husband is going to build and install coyote rollers on the “shorter” areas of our walls and gates and we are going to build a run to keep them in when we are not home and able to keep an eye on them when they free range. I will definitely have to look into the hardware cloth for our enclosure for sure!
 
littledog said:
What part of the country are you in? You can put your general location in your avatar, then we can know what pests and predators are prevalent in your area and the best methods to stop them.
For example, where I live we have raccoons, coyotes, roaming dogs, weasels, hawks and owls. Over the years we lost one to a weasel and another to a neighbor's dog, but by far our worst predator has been birds of prey. On several occasions, our chickens were free-ranging in broad daylight with us right there! and a hawk swooped down and airlifted a chicken! For this reason, we no longer allow them to free-range, but keep them in a large run with a hardware cloth apron and sides, and poultry wire over the top. We haven't lost any to predators since then!
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We are in Las Vegas, Nevada. We definitely have coyote, hawks, mountain lion, maybe bobcats… we are definitely going to build them a large run and enclose it. We didn’t think we had that many predators to worry about but maybe we do?🤷🏼‍♀️
 

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