Prevention?

[jaku]

My birds go out to pasture in their tractor tomorrow. It's pretty tight to the ground, (I can't get a finger under it,) and extremely heavy, but I'm worried that something will dig under. I live in the Michigan woods, so there are plenty of predators. Since predators tend to go for the easiest meal, would setting a live trap before I have a problem be a good idea, or would the bait just attract predators more than the chickens would? How big is the risk from digging predators? I've read through this section, and haven't seen that many losses that have occured from digging- any stories of problems, and how they were solved? I might be overthinking it, as I've done before with potential chicken problems, but I'm convinced that nothing can get in from anywhere but below, and hope I'm covered enough. Here's my tractor:

 

[lost]

im new at this to but i kept a trap out side my and i havnt cought nothing

 

[gila_dog]

That is a beautiful chicken tractor. But I would be worried more about dogs than anything else. I had a rabbit hutch made of that hardware cloth and a dog just tore right thru it and murdered my bunnies.

 

[Gindee77]

I always have a live trap set because we have coons around here so bad! I lost almost a whole flock to coons years ago and I don't want that to happen again. un

All I've caught in my trap so far is a cat. We have a baby monitor in our coop shed so we can hear things that get around our chickens at night. But so far (and I've had chicks for almost 7 weeks) all we've heard is meowing on our monitor...LOL

We saw a huge coon on our deck about 3 or 4 days before we got our first chicks and I freaked out! We scared it away and so far we've been pretty lucky that we haven't seen or heard any more coons. But they will be back, I have no doubt. And when they do there's a little can of Vienna sausages waiting in the live trap for them and a free ticket to the woods far far away.

We've had our chicks out in our tractor almost daily since we got it done a couple weeks ago. The only thing I've noticed so far during the day is a hawk flying over sort of slow, checking the chicks out. But he can't get to them. I worry a little bit about something digging under our tractor, but we don't have the chicks out unless one of us is here, oh and we have a 6' privacy fence that keeps lots of critters out, like dogs and coyotes.

Here's what our tractor looks like. I wish I had a good pic of the chickens in it...LOL It's kind of hard to tell, but ours is covered with hardware cloth too.