Hawks

[D'Angelo N Va.]

Welcome first of all...purple Martins are Great!! they do not like their houses near anything...in the open is how they like it. they will eat their weight in gold for insects.

 

[birdicus7]

I too have had experience with a hawk taking full grown RIR's. Actually had the hawk come in the coop through the pop door and was found there in the dark! My father grabbed him off the roost with a welder's glove on. He grabbed the hawk and it grabbed him back!
Had to carry it outside and ring his bell against the coop to get him to let go!

 

[Wifezilla]

I keep seeing posts that hawks can't or won't take full sized chickens. That is totally false!

Exactly! Even if a chicken, or in my case, a duck, is too heavy to carry off, a hawk will just decapitate it and eat the head.​

 

[ADozenGirlz]

Quote:
Hawks are capable of more than I imagined. When our baby chicks were about 6 weeks old, this hawk reached in THROUGH the chicken wire that surrounds the bottom of the coop and killed one of our Silkie chicks by pulling her part way through. It was a ghastly scene. We had NO idea as we were snapping these photos, we thought we were so smart to have put netting on top of the run and that he was being denied access to our girls. Not so. We immediately reinforced with hardware cloth.