ESCAPE!!!

[guinealeghorn]

Has anyone ever had their chickens escape the coop? Well, here is where you can post about it! Mine escaped yesterday, in the middle of winter. I haven't been letting them free range in winter because they will sit in the snow until we come and take them in. We don't want frozen chicken! Anyways, we were relaxing when we heard a guinea that didn't sound like she was in the coop. We went to the window, and saw it g around outside. We chased her to the coop. They had managed to open the door in the coop! The guinea went in, but four hens were still out! I caught the three white leghorns easily. The other was Betsy, who does not like to be touched. After chasing her through trees and using a bucket of scratch grains to lure her, I finally got her in. They must have perched on the handle to push it down, and when they jumped off, they pushed the door. It's the only thing I could come up with. Please post your escape stories! I would love to hear them!

 

[chippy99th]

Wow, that's a funny story. What an escape theory! Just when you think you'v covered all the bases...

Ohhh yes we have had escapees. We're in the suburbs and don't have a lot of predators, so while the coop itself has a roof, the attached run does not. Determined fliers can easily get out, and I've even had one or two bantams squish themselves under the gate.

My rooster flies out of the run as a matter of course in his daily routine, but I don't harrass him about it. So long as he stays out of the neighbors' yard, he can split his time between the coop ladies and the free range ladies if he wants to. He has never tried to leave the yard.

We did have one hen, a tiny brown bantam mutt, sneakily lay her eggs in some stored furniture behind my neighbors' house. We didn't know she was doing it until she went missing, and then we couldn't find her...until she came parading back with TWENTY BABIES!!! Needless to say I did not let her keep them all as I did not feel like feeding the neighbors' cat and she was too little to fit even half of them underneath her! I have no idea how she managed so many eggs! She was about the size of a fat pigeon!

I wish I could have kept that hen...even with trimmed wings and closed in a more secure coop, she still got out and hid nests and ended up having a couple more clutches when I couldn't find her nest in time, all within a year. Would have been great to have such a reliable broody hen, if I was looking for more babies at that period of time. But I wasn't. So, we found her a new home.

 

[guinealeghorn]

Thanks for posting! We live in Wisconsin and have lots of raccoons, so our coop is pretty secure. The only way they could get out was by opening the door. We didn't think they could open it, but I guess we were wrong!