Time to go on the offensive...enough is enough.

[Folly's place]

If you set it up for bantams, that will include rats...
My Belgian d'Uccles weigh in at just under 2 pounds, at heaviest, and their chicks at 2 grams.

Mary

 

[jspeese]

I think sanitation and eliminating food sources is the best solution. Unfortunately rats and mice can get into very small places and are to some extent a fact of life that will always require management. Another thing is to avoid whenever possible creating habitats. Clean up any piles of old lumber or materials around the coop, I don't think in most areas of the country you need insulation and double walls (which unfortunately make perfect mouse habitats), and if I were building a new coop, I'd consider a raised, solid floor rather than a concrete one, which rats can burrow under. Even if they can't actually burrow through the concrete into the coop, they can still burrow under it and make nests and breed. If it is impossible to completely rat and mouse proof your coop, as may well be the case if you convert an existing structure into a coop, I'd at least build a rat-proof brooder of some sort. A rat probably wouldn't tackle a grown chicken but baby chicks are fair game. Here in the South we also have rat snakes, which despite the name also like baby chicks, ducklings, even full-grown quail. A rat-proof brooder should keep them out as well.

 

[Al Gerhart]

Could you add weights to the bar on the feeder if you only have bantams? Just enough to make the bird weight the same as a normal bird?

Yes, that can be done. What makes a rat proof feeder work is the combination of weight and reach and the difference between both of those values in reference to a rat/wild bird and a chicken.

Weighting the treadle step makes the mechanism more sensitive, or able to be operated by a lighter critter but the bantam is still too far away to reach the feed. You can add one of our duck steps to allow the bantam to get in close enough to eat but you have negated both the difference in weight between the rat and the bantam and the distance each can reach.

What is possible is to depend upon the larger birds eating to give the bantams a chance to eat during the initial training/rat starvation period, then later add the duck step once the majority of the rats have left to find dinner elsewhere.

But if you are going to allow smaller birds to use a treadle feeder get the soft close door so the door is slowed down a bit to allow the small birds to get out of the way if the big bird steps off the treadle. And there is no free lunch anywhere in the universe, there are risks of allowing rats and mice to come in contact with chickens and there are risks in preventing the same. Once you understand exactly how fragile most chickens are, how close their immune systems are to being overwhelmed, you are ready to calculate the real risk of doing nothing to solve the rodent problem.

 

[Al Gerhart]

If you set it up for bantams, that will include rats...
My Belgian d'Uccles weigh in at just under 2 pounds, at heaviest, and their chicks at 2 grams.

Mary

I think chicks will never be able to have a feeder that could exclude mice and rats unless someone could make a durable and dependable feeder that used vision recognition or RFID tags on the chicks and that begs the question of if the chicks wouldn't simply be eaten by the rats and mice. Luckily we can probably exclude both rats and mice from the small space needed by chicks. The dead space so to speak would be between them feathering out and two pounds weight.

I have given a lot of thought to another avenue of approach; the fact that a chicken will grasp with its claws when given an appropriate sized rod or cylinder to stand on. It might be possible in a clean environment to "split" the rod or perch and allow the grasping action to bring the two parts together to close a switch that operates a solenoid that allows a door to unlock and swing open. The problems are how dirty a chicken pen usually becomes, leading to fouling or jamming of the switch or physical parts, and the costs of the mechanism needed to make this work. Add wet poop or mud during freezing weather and I think the idea might be impractical or prone to fail enough that the resulting contraption would get a lot of negative reviews. And I can see rats learning to push their rear end up against the switch and defeat the $300.00 feeder.

 

[Kusanar]

I have given a lot of thought to another avenue of approach; the fact that a chicken will grasp with its claws when given an appropriate sized rod or cylinder to stand on. It might be possible in a clean environment to "split" the rod or perch and allow the grasping action to bring the two parts together to close a switch that operates a solenoid that allows a door to unlock and swing open. The problems are how dirty a chicken pen usually becomes, leading to fouling or jamming of the switch or physical parts, and the costs of the mechanism needed to make this work. Add wet poop or mud during freezing weather and I think the idea might be impractical or prone to fail enough that the resulting contraption would get a lot of negative reviews. And I can see rats learning to push their rear end up against the switch and defeat the $300.00 feeder.

I think you may be on to something there. But, rather than doing a moving mechanism which as you pointed out would jam easily, maybe something similar to the technology that is in a touch screen where it can sense the touch of bare skin and make it to where both pieces have to be being touched in order for it to allow access. Being pooped on shouldn't bother that as touch screens don't react when dirt or water is dropped on them, just touch.

Also, there are automated cat and dog doors that read a microchip or rfid tag, you could put rfid legbands on the birds and simply put the feed behind a door that will not allow anything but a banded animal thorough it.

 

[Al Gerhart]

Clever, I wouldn't have thought of touch screens or a membrane switch.

I think the deal killer would be the cost of such a system. For years people asked for a larger feeder, and I mean hundreds and hundreds of emails or messages on Facebook or the like. So I built around 500 of a mix of large and extra large (33 and 63 pound capacity). Other companies had larger feeders, that should work, right?

Nope, turns out that feeders are very price sensitive, the large at $114.70 might sell at a ratio of thirty to one compared to a medium feeder even though the cost per pound of capacity is identical. The extra large feeder that will take more than a full bag of feed hardly moves.

What I learned was that yeah, people want a larger feeder but they mean a larger feeder at the same price. LOL

I suspect that spending $5000 developing a membrane switch treadle would be wasted and the only way to find out is to spend the money to work up a very expensive series of prototypes and either sell them for hundreds of dollars per feeder to test the market or risk spending $50,000 to make a container load that might be sold for under $200.00 per feeder and find out they won't sell at that price. We saw the Grandpa feeder own the market for a few years at over $240.00 per feeder but the first real competitor that came along (that would be me) forced them to cut their price by 40%. If the membrane switch feeder worked you can bet that the Chinese would have it on Ebay and Amazon within six months!

A mechanical system would be problematic due to the short range of motion a chicken claw would generate, especially a small bird, the travel would be very small. Now you would have to amplify that travel distance to pull a pin to unlock the door, amplification requires the initial force to be reduced, getting the mechanism clogged with dirt and feathers is going to make it weaker. A 5/8" treadle switch travel transmitted through a cable like on a lawnmower control is going to have a lot of friction so you would have to use pulleys to increase the torque, trading distance traveled for power at the end, leaving you with a very short travel distance for any locking pin.

In the end an elegant but expensive solution is no solution at all for flock owners. I think this is why some of the late entries into the market went with plastic and Chinese manufacturing to try to avoid costs and keep the price down but by doing so guaranteed poor durability and ensured bad reviews.

 

[Kusanar]

Clever, I wouldn't have thought of touch screens or a membrane switch.

I think the deal killer would be the cost of such a system. For years people asked for a larger feeder, and I mean hundreds and hundreds of emails or messages on Facebook or the like. So I built around 500 of a mix of large and extra large (33 and 63 pound capacity). Other companies had larger feeders, that should work, right?

Yeah, I haven't tried to make anything like that, just throwing ideas at the wall. I'm still working on a self cleaning litter box... I'm hoping to get the one I'm working on semi-done this Christmas break.

 

[jspeese]

Because rat snakes are also a problem, I brood chicks in a (hopefully) snake- and rat-proof facility. Starting the chicks early in the spring when even in South Carolina it is still too cool, at least at night, for large snakes to be really active also helps. Unfortunately a rat snake can kill and eat a bird as large as a full-grown quail, and may attempt to eat (and in the process, of course kill) a slightly larger bird. I keep my feed in sealed containers (trash cans), which isn't hard for me because I have a small flock and generally buy only a bag or two at a time. It isn't hard to make a rat-proof brooder out of scrap lumber and hardware cloth. I put straw over the hardware cloth floor (to protect their feet and keep things warmer), but it would be better to use rabbit hutch wire if you keep the chicks directly on the wire. I wouldn't mind the snakes if they just ate rats and mice.