Bobcat

[Artichoke Lover]

Make sure your coop roof is secure and consider a guardian dog. you will see signs if the cat tries to dig under but cats are not known to be diggers. They can climb about anything and have a huge jump span. Deterrents work well to start but will fade or be outsmarted, a dog learns quick and is always on guard

Luckily my roof is secure and quite tall with overhangs on all sides(at least 16ft) as for the dog I would consider 1 in the future if I get more animals but at the moment I can’t afford to care for another dog. We currently have an Aussie but she is a big baby. I would also need at least two large breed guard dogs. It’s not safe to only have 1 in our area the coyotes run in large enough packs that they will pick off a single dog... a few friends have had that happen with their guardian dogs sadly. My chickens are only allowed to free range under supervision but I will keep them up completely for a few weeks.

 

[cmom]

I have electric wires around my coops and pens and they work great. I have lots of predators but I'm sure they know the electric wires are there. I also think the adults teach their young not to mess with the hot wires. A chicken isn't worth getting zapped for. They may relate the hot wires to chickens.

 

[Artichoke Lover]

Thank you for all of your help.Im going to look into getting some hot wire. And I’m going to keep my chickens in the run for a little while.

 

[cmom]

I love the hot wires. No ground predators bother my birds.

 

[blue australorp]

This is the bobcat I eliminated. He kept coming back so I trapped him and eliminated him. I have seen others since but they haven't tried to get my birds. I don't like to eliminate anything but if they are persistent and kill my birds, I will.

We’ve had a bobcat get some of our flock on 3 occasions now in the past 6 weeks. I’m so bummed. Ours is much smaller than the one you killed. Ours looks almost just like an oversized house cat. But gosh it feels so sad to me to kill it. But I can see you’ve been through a lot with your flock so it makes sense, but looking at that photo, what a beautiful animal, so sad. I wish there was a way to allow everything to live. But it also made me so upset each of the 3 times to see our chickens dead - 6 the first time, 4 the second time, & 1 the third time. After all the work of raising them and paying for their feed & naming them. We’ve progressively got them more & more locked up as they were free ranging mostly before. I’m not sure why I’m even writing this, just wishing there was a way for the chickens to have more space again, and for the bobcat to live. We were hoping maybe like some have said perhaps it has babies nearby & that eventually they’d all move on and we could wait it out, but after reading some threads it seems some think it will just keep sticking around since it has succeeded here. Any additional thoughts for me? I wondered if anyone has ever tried like a radio that goes off with a sensor when movement is detected, If the human voices would scare the predators off or if they’d get too smart for that.

 

[Artichoke Lover]

I guess I’ll give an update. The bobcat that was stalking our coop hung around for the rest of the spring before moving on. We still see bobcats on our deer cameras on the other side of the property but it never succeeded in getting any of the chickens.

 

[CanadaEh]

I guess I’ll give an update. The bobcat that was stalking our coop hung around for the rest of the spring before moving on. We still see bobcats on our deer cameras on the other side of the property but it never succeeded in getting any of the chickens.

Lucky you. Having flock killed by bobcat 2 winters ago, we have electric fencing now and no sighting of any predators around coop and run ever since. Ignoring them hanging around is asking for trouble or you have to be damn sure your chicken enclosure is predator proof.