What Killed Half My Flock?

[Dr Pepper]

I’m not going to go into much detail here but last night something got 5 of my chickens and after searching we found 3 bodies and 5 living birds out of 10 birds. The bodies had their heads cut off like it was just for sport. One chicken had part of its wings cut off perfectly like it was done with scissors. Another had a patch of feathers missing with a small scratch. My silkie rooster who is small but pure muscle didn’t help a thing and we didn’t find him. Yet, after all this, I found a hen on top of the coop untouched. Lucky bird. I’m thinking raccoon because the door was open but I’ve had doors come open themselves before on this coop on a different door so it could be a Fox. Yeah I went into detail.

 

[Ms Clucky]

Sound to me like a bunch of brats! We had rabbits and the neighbor kids kept on opening the door and letting them out. I can't count how many times we had to round them up. My suggestion, Two words wildlife camera.

 

[aart]

Coulda been anything with the door open.
The wing thing might help someone tell, but I don't know.

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[centrarchid]

Fox.

 

[Jim Wellman]

Any pics? Could help people with their guessing.
May want to add a camera in your coop. Do wi-fi and power reach your coop/run. If not, you cold always setup a game cam to see what visits your coop at night.
I added cameras inside my coop and run. I set the run camera to alert me of any movement in the run, which would only happen at night if I left a door open or a bear shredded it's way into the run.

 

[Dr Pepper]

Thank you guys! I’ll add some photos.

 

[Natureluv]

Raccoon would typically do the type of damage you described, especially removing individual parts like legs/wings/head. There may be other predators that do as well, but between opossum, raccoon, hawk and dog, I’d say the raccoon did it. I have seen chickens that had wings or part of a leg or head taken off by coons. Pulled them off through the fence of a chicken tractor at night. A dog would do much more widespread damage to the bird, and not remove individual parts. I wouldn’t rule out opossum, because I’m not familiar with the type of damage they do. The ones I’ve encountered were usually most interested in eggs.

 

[PennyM16]

Im not familiar with what different predators do, but the one incident I’ve had was with a fox and he removed the head from my hen

 

[Dr Pepper]

Hunting camera shows a fox

 

[mowin]

There relentless. He'll be back.