For all of you with chickens in the suburbs, do you leave your chickens out of the run when you are not home?
I always put them back in the run if I leave the house, but they have been fine when I have had the opportunity to doze off for a short nap.
My chicken area has 6 foot block walls facing two neighbors, but the fence is only about 4 feet high on the other two sides with a pool on one side and dogs on another. (The dogs and chickens are cool with each other.). The chickens have not flown over any fences so far, but I know they can if given the motivation.
I live in the East SGV 'burbs. I've backyard free-ranged for 6 yrs whether we're home or not. At first we only let the two Silkies out for an hour or two with supervision. Then we added a White Leghorn and Cuckoo Marans and the 4 of them were very good about free-ranging all day. But not until we set up several shelters in the backyard like a pop-up canopy, low lean-to's, lawn furniture, several dog houses, a composter, several potted plants, and a couple trash cans where they could quickly hide from our Cooper's Hawk or snooze under shade.
We divided the people side from the chicken backyard with a 28" tall rabbit fencing and the chickens respect the short barrier. At first the new younger pullets will try to fly over the barrier but after gently ushering them back to their side of the yard they came to respect the short fence barrier. Of course, it takes some patience at first with the younger birds but they catch on very quickly to the rules of the yard. We also keep more docile birds now which makes it much easier to keep chickens on their side -- we still have the two original Silkies and have two docile Breda with them.
We re-homed the more aggressive White Leghorn, Buff Leghorns, and Marans and keep only the lightweight gentle Breda with our Silkies now. We had a lovely Blue Wheaten Ameraucana that was great with the Silkies but lost her in our bad heatwave last year. I won't be getting any more heavily underdowned or larger fowl in our climate -- they suffer too much from our excessive heatwaves and drought.
We had a 5-1/2 foot chainlink fence but it wasn't private enough so we put up a block wall and iron bars this past year for better soundproofing and more privacy plus we added 18" of privacy fencing on top of the block wall. It wasn't to keep the chickens inside but to keep neighborhood stray dogs out. Two strays broke down our chainlink gate once so now we have double gates plus iron bar fencing all around the front yard for triple gate protection. Dog owners don't do anything to build strong fencing for their pooches so we chicken owners have to fortify against the occasional careless dog owner.
As for aerial predators like hawks, they usually like to swoop down on running prey, so we have lots of hiding shelters scattered about the yard so a hen doesn't have to dash very far to a hiding place. Our Cooper's Hawk will perch 5 feet away from a hiding hen but won't engage in combat on the ground with her -- darnedest thing. The neighborhood Crow murder (flock) chase off the hawks and the Crows don't bother our 4 hens or their feed. We love our neighborhood Crows.
