- May 18, 2014
- 7
- 0
- 7
Hi,
I'm located in Huntington Beach, Ca and am completely new to backyard chicken raising! My family just adopted 3 silkie pullets and we are having so much fun watching them. We hope they lay soon, but since we got silkies we already know that we'd rather have them as pets than for egg production.
We have a nice coop set-up that we bought for them and they have learned quickly to return to it at dusk. Their slow migration to it every day is pretty funny. We were originally going to build a covered run for them for when we weren't home, but after watching them have so much fun scratching around for grub we've made the decision to take the risk and allow them to continue to free range in our backyard (it's fairly sizable).
I think our area has minimal predators anyway. I haven't seen raccoons, ever, only possums, but since we close their coop at night we aren't too worried. The main thing that worries me are the hawks, but I haven't seen any in our neighborhood because we have a murder of crows that patrol the area.
Which brings me to a question. Should we be worried about crows attacking our silkie hens?
I'm located in Huntington Beach, Ca and am completely new to backyard chicken raising! My family just adopted 3 silkie pullets and we are having so much fun watching them. We hope they lay soon, but since we got silkies we already know that we'd rather have them as pets than for egg production.
We have a nice coop set-up that we bought for them and they have learned quickly to return to it at dusk. Their slow migration to it every day is pretty funny. We were originally going to build a covered run for them for when we weren't home, but after watching them have so much fun scratching around for grub we've made the decision to take the risk and allow them to continue to free range in our backyard (it's fairly sizable).
I think our area has minimal predators anyway. I haven't seen raccoons, ever, only possums, but since we close their coop at night we aren't too worried. The main thing that worries me are the hawks, but I haven't seen any in our neighborhood because we have a murder of crows that patrol the area.
Which brings me to a question. Should we be worried about crows attacking our silkie hens?
and Welcome To BYC! They love eggs and will take chicks or young birds but it seems to be fairly rare that they go after older/bigger birds (how big are your silkies) and it is usually when they are in big groups and probably very hungry... there are some threads on BYC where people have had losses to crows 
