Keep chick's safe

[Savagemonster89]

Hello everyone! This is my first time raising baby chicks. My mama hen did a great job of hatching 1 egg so I got her a few other babies to add to the family. She's a great mama but I'm unsure how to keep all the little chicks from getting stuck or escaping out the coop and run. Right now I have mama and her babies in a dog crate on the coop floor but there isn't much room for them to wonder around. My question is should I just let them go and be free or keep them in there until they are a bit bigger? We have chain link fence between our neighbors house and the gate for the run is also chain link. I noticed that they chicks are so small they can go thru chicken wire!

 

[azygous]

Baby chicks, as you have already suspected, are easy tasty tiny snacks for any animal wandering by should a tiny one slip through that fencing. Chain link is also large enough to allow large animals to reach a paw in to snag a chick, and it's large enough for weasels, skunks, snakes,to slip into the run to eat the chicks. Even chicken wire is too large to keep chicks safe. You need to run a couple feet of hardware "cloth" around the bottom of the fencing.

You don't say how many other chickens you have. Adult chickens will sometimes peck and kill chicks. Owls will kill chicks, and they can fly through impossibly narrow openings. Jays and crows will kill and eat chicks. So, yes, lots of danger out there.

 

[Savagemonster89]

Baby chicks, as you have already suspected, are easy tasty tiny snacks for any animal wandering by should a tiny one slip through that fencing. Chain link is also large enough to allow large animals to reach a paw in to snag a chick, and it's large enough for weasels, skunks, snakes,to slip into the run to eat the chicks. Even chicken wire is too large to keep chicks safe. You need to run a couple feet of hardware "cloth" around the bottom of the fencing.

You don't say how many other chickens you have. Adult chickens will sometimes peck and kill chicks. Owls will kill chicks, and they can fly through impossibly narrow openings. Jays and crows will kill and eat chicks. So, yes, lots of danger out there.

I have let them put under supervision. The other hens don't seem to care about them very much. The only predators we have in the desert are snakes, squirrels, crows and our dogs.

 

[azygous]

At least you don't have bears. But you probably have bobcats and foxes that can swoop in out of nowhere. But snakes, crows and dogs are enough.