How do you wrangle your stubborn sheep of a chicken into the coop at night?

[RaineyMiniRanch]

We lost one pullet (Hickety Pickety) last week because she refused to coop up for the night. We found her body on the edge of our property today.

Tonight, we had a Cream Crested Legbar roo, Colonel Sanders, who refused to coop up...ran away from my husband as he herded them in for the night. Now, we can't find him on the property. Pretty sure he's going to go the way of Hickety Pickety.

How do you coop up stubborn chickens?

 

[Teila]

Howdy RaineyMiniRanch

I am sorry to hear of your loss

I am not sure if I will be able to answer your question as I have no personal experience with chickens not going into the coop at night.

Because of neighbourhood dogs and cats and the possibility of aerial predators my gals only get to free range of an afternoon in the garden for an hour or so in winter and a couple of hours in summer and pretty much all day on the weekend, supervised.

Anyways, come dusk they quite happily put themselves to bed and I simply close the doors once they are all snug. Probably 10mins or so before bed time, they congregate around the coop and run, just pecking around that area.

Have you had your chickens very long? Were they locked in the coop and run for the first couple of weeks so that they learnt where ‘home’ was and where to roost?

My gals will all come running if I sing out the ‘treat call’ which is the sound they associate with treats or meal worms and they come running to see what I have.

Will they come if you call them, bribe them with food?

 

[Monkeybean415]

We have a closed run/coop so we lure our flock in at bedtime with a treat. They will all go in on their own eventually but we've had problems with bears so need to put them away earlier than they'd do in their own