- Jan 26, 2012
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Ok, so I'll probably go out and take pictures tomorrow so you guys can help me out more thoroughly, but I'm keeping myself from being overwhelmed with sadness by keeping my mind working, so I figured I'd go ahead and ask for suggestions while I'm up anyway.
Over the last week we've been losing birds like crazy. I believe we had...13? maybe at the beginning of this week. I now have 5. 1 was found dead in the run (looked like something tried to eat it through the bars) and 1 was found dead in the coop, so we tightened up any spots we found where we thought they could get in. I wasn't home to close the run door tonight but we usually don't need to anyway as we *thought* all sides were buried plenty (we are renting and the coop was already here). Well, apparently it wasn't, and tonight I came home to find one more bird dead and very obvious dig holes outside of the run. So at least now we know it's a fox or dog or something similar, anyway (we had a raccoon attack last year and until now I figured that was what was happening again).
I'm just not sure how to make my coop completely predator proof.
There is a door I can shut to the run, so that will help until we can get the run sufficiently safe again (I'm thinking buried fence for 18" or so, then an 18" apron, or does that seem like overkill?). But the big problem is that half of the coop is what you could call a "run" - the coop is basically 2 rooms - one room with 3 walls of wood, the fourth wall of wood with a section missing leading to the second room, which shares the wood wall with the cutout, a wood back wall, and then the other 2 walls are completely made of hardware cloth. One wall of hardware cloth is shared with the run. Now technically I could put ALL the chickens in the wood room, make sure I close off the run, and put a door between the two rooms. BUT I have the two rooms to keep my flocks separate - I keep my boys in the mesh room to keep them from stressing out the girls. But if the fox can get into the run, it can dig into the second room, too, either through the run or under the other side wall of hardware cloth (I'm not sure how deep that side is buried).
Obviously the best bet would be to tear the whole thing down and build a newer, safer coop from scratch, but as I said, we don't own this house and can't (and my husband won't) make huge improvements like that to a place we don't own. So I need to be able to fix this up as best I can. I have 19 babies right now, 13 of which will be ready to go into the coop in the next month.
Over the last week we've been losing birds like crazy. I believe we had...13? maybe at the beginning of this week. I now have 5. 1 was found dead in the run (looked like something tried to eat it through the bars) and 1 was found dead in the coop, so we tightened up any spots we found where we thought they could get in. I wasn't home to close the run door tonight but we usually don't need to anyway as we *thought* all sides were buried plenty (we are renting and the coop was already here). Well, apparently it wasn't, and tonight I came home to find one more bird dead and very obvious dig holes outside of the run. So at least now we know it's a fox or dog or something similar, anyway (we had a raccoon attack last year and until now I figured that was what was happening again).
I'm just not sure how to make my coop completely predator proof.
There is a door I can shut to the run, so that will help until we can get the run sufficiently safe again (I'm thinking buried fence for 18" or so, then an 18" apron, or does that seem like overkill?). But the big problem is that half of the coop is what you could call a "run" - the coop is basically 2 rooms - one room with 3 walls of wood, the fourth wall of wood with a section missing leading to the second room, which shares the wood wall with the cutout, a wood back wall, and then the other 2 walls are completely made of hardware cloth. One wall of hardware cloth is shared with the run. Now technically I could put ALL the chickens in the wood room, make sure I close off the run, and put a door between the two rooms. BUT I have the two rooms to keep my flocks separate - I keep my boys in the mesh room to keep them from stressing out the girls. But if the fox can get into the run, it can dig into the second room, too, either through the run or under the other side wall of hardware cloth (I'm not sure how deep that side is buried). Obviously the best bet would be to tear the whole thing down and build a newer, safer coop from scratch, but as I said, we don't own this house and can't (and my husband won't) make huge improvements like that to a place we don't own. So I need to be able to fix this up as best I can. I have 19 babies right now, 13 of which will be ready to go into the coop in the next month.
