Enhance the chicken house off the floor with a feet approximately to discourage rats, skunks and snakes from taking on residence beneath it and stealing eggs, chicks or youthful hens. Be sure to keep your henhouse floor tight and patch any holes that snakes and rats could possibly get through.
Enclose the coop inside a secure chicken go to discourage dogs, coyotes, bobcats along with other four-legged carnivores from accessing your flock. You may choose chicken wire, welded-wire mesh, electric netting or any other fencing materials with sufficiently little openings (or sufficiently high-current electrical pulses) to maintain your wild birds in and predators out. Bobcats and coyotes are perfect jumpers and may easily obvious 4-feet-high fences, so construct your enclosure appropriately tall, or give a cover internet to help keep the varmints from vaulting a fence.
Cover the chicken run with welded-wire fencing, chicken wire or game-bird netting, or use a random variety of crisscrossing wires overhead to discourage hawks and owls from creating a buffet from your wild birds. Should you shut your chickens within the coop during the night, owl attacks won’t be a problem. But hungry owls are cagey and could grab their meal right in the evening, or slightly in advance, therefore if owls really are a problem in your town, don’t hold back until at night to shut in the coop.
Choose small-mesh fencing materials for attaching coops and runs when raccoons and people from the mink or fisher family are some of the predators. Raccoons along with other fairly dexterous creatures are infamous for reaching through bigger meshed fencing or chicken wire and killing the chickens they are able to snag. This really is
particularly important whenever you keep the chickens inside a fully enclosed wire coop/run, for example various chicken tractor (moveable coops with no floor) designs. Although 2-by-3-inch welded-wire fencing is less costly, you’ll lose less wild birds if you are using 1-by-2-inch mesh or smaller sized welded wire.
Bury galvanized hardware cloth or any other welded-wire fencing round the perimeter from the chicken run if you have troubles with predators digging below your surface fencing.
Give a night light (motion-sensor-activated) which will ton the chicken run with light at night or install some Nite Guard Solar predator-deterrent lights (see advertisement inside front cover). This can keep most nocturnal predators from the coop.
Provide your chicken-friendly dogs the run from the chicken
yard – particularly during the night. Make sure your dogs aren’t enticed to chase running, squawking chickens when you purchase to not close-up the coop during the night or decide to leave the dogs within the chicken yard throughout the day.
Get ready to consider quick action whenever you uncover predation. You are able to take measures to get rid of the predator in order to eliminate its use of your wild birds. Failure to do this can lead to subsequent losses, when the predators think the buffet lines are open.
Produce a predator-danger zone round the coop and chicken yard. Most terrestrial predators are uncomfortable crossing a place with minimal cover. Go on and plant shrubbery within the chicken run – your wild birds will like the colour tone and nibbling around the leaves – but leave the perimeter as cover-free as possible. Raccoons are less inclined to attempt to work their “hands” right into a welded-wire enclosure whether they have to sit down on view to get it done.
Resourse: http://grit.com/creatures/
How to protect your chickens from predators.
Video COMMENTS:
Giselle D: Coming from Texas, yalls channel is amazing, keep up the good work!!!!
Beeper Man: Good info. Thanks
Greg Peterson: This is an Excellent Video – THANKS GreenDesertTV
Denise Frickey: We kept a couple of large geese, which are amazing 'watchdogs', and a collie mix raised with chickens that kept the predators away. Might want to correct your title, I don't think you meant 'predictors'. Like the buried fence suggestion-I've used it to keep dogs in, but not wild things out.
archersfriend: We have Buried fencing around our Pen, Motion Lights, and dogs. \nCoons and skunks can reach Through everything but the 1/4 or 1/2 inch hardware cloth (really welded wire) and if they can reach a chicken, they pull it to the fence an kill it. Coons and possums can get into very small opening and thus got 6 chickens in 2 nights.\nThe Coyotes have attacked during the day when the chickens are free roaming to catch bugs. Coyotes have accounted for another 15 or so chickens in 2 years.\nHawks are a threat during the day and if a chicken will not go in the pen at night, it is vulnerable to Owls as well as coons, bobcats, coyotes, possums, and skunks.\nWe even has a ewe lamb that weighed around 70 pounds taken without a trace during the day. I am sure it was a big cat because a coyote or bobcat can not jump a fence with a 70 pound payload.\nLife is hard in the country EVEN when we Have Done Everything short of 24-7 armed guards.
Sapper Gardener: Thanks! We love Greg's podcast. Great to see him live.
yard – particularly during the night. Make sure your dogs aren’t enticed to chase running, squawking chickens when you purchase to not close-up the coop during the night or decide to leave the dogs within the chicken yard throughout the day.