That dreadful sound in the middle of the night. A morning wake up where your wonderful flock has casualties and feathers spread across the yard. What can be done to provide protection for your poultry from predators?
I have read if you keep poultry, then you will eventually lose some to an attack. Though we tried to avoid this ourselves…it still occurred. A few times actually.
In 5 years we have received some hard lessons learned. From a free range backyard and open coop concept in the urban city (lost almost the whole flock that night) to country living with foxes and owls picking off a bird or two.
We have had those horrible morning wake ups. These are some of the changes we have made to help get ahead of the predator problem!
Challenge
Wildlife has to eat too!
Who are our players? You, your poultry, and the predator! That predator is dependent on your neck of the woods to provide its living. Hunger is a great motivator and we have seen the worst attacks in the winter when predator food sources are more scares.
We have dealt with foxes, owls, hawks, opossums, and raccoons thus far in Virginia. This will vary by location and climate though many of these items can be applied anywhere.
Coop
You can build a fort knox style coop, and maybe even an attached run to protect your birds. I however am not on the level of a raccoon and finding that random corner that was weaker than I thought is not as easy. Or the air ventilation in the coop rafters that allows the owl in. My point is the predator gets a vote.
Size, mobility, access for eggs, cleaning! All major things to consider for a coop without even jumping into the security topic!
Our first coop was small but stationary. We were not originally in a predator protection mindset. A morning wake up with only 2 chickens alive resulted in the rapid purchase of an automatic chicken door!
The current coop is massive, but built on 4×6 skids allowing us to move it with the tractor! It is currently in the 2nd location on the homestead with a planned move in the coming weeks. This also bypassed some amazing city codes of permanent structures…since ours is not stationary.
I highly recommend an automatic chicken door. This has worked great in minimizing the work we do while also providing the security of a closed door for the chickens.
We have been using the same door on two different coops for about the past 3 years. Only recently did we have chickens deciding the nice wires going to the battery, sensor and solar panels looked tasty enough to eat. I have rewired and routed these wires multiple times over the past few months to keep the system working. Most commonly they seem to sever the wire to the daylight sensor.
The sensor is an important part to the ease of this system. It opens at daylight, and I do not have to go open a door to let the birds out of the coop. And it closes at night, which the chickens get trained to and will be perched before the door closes for the night. This reduces our daily chore time and overall frees up our ratio of homesteading to our actual jobs and raising young children.
When the sensor is broken though the rest of the system does work with a simple magnet. The birds get let out slightly later when we do the morning water check before heading to work. And they are put back up at night after we get our boys to bed and the sun is down. Conveniently as the fall comes and the days get shorter we are able to shut the door as we finish our post dinner family walk.
Disclaimer, we have never managed to get the ducks or geese on the same page as the chickens. Sometimes as the ducks get broody they will start staying in the coop. We have had some stay coop bound in the winter. Others will sleep on the snow! Which comes to the next level of protection.
Fence protection
No longer the privacy fence we used in our urban setting. But an electric poultry net fence. We have a whole post on the use of these fences.
So how does an electric fence help us now? It is not to keep the birds in, though it does help most days. This fence is critical in keeping a barrier to any four legged critters looking for a quick meal. The ducks and geese primarily sleep outside making this absolutely necessary.
I used the premier 1 poultry netting for raising meat chickens on pasture and our small turkey flock. They are easy to move and outside of some early predator attacks from foxes on the small meat chickens we have not had issues.
The largest downside we have found thus far is the occasional duckling or turkey that gets stuck in the fence. At 3 weeks old our first tangled duckling did not make it through the night of her ordeal. A turkey hen tried to escape while tangled up and broke her neck for a large loss in our small heritage turkey starting flock.
Overhead protection
The coop provides nightime protection for those that choose to enter before the door closes. For our fearless other birds, we provide a few options.
Deterrence
A double duty option for daytime and night! T-post and tomato cages spread out in the yard. This provides some odd obstacles that may or may not be effective at keeping owls away at night. What we know, a goose and 2 turkeys were lost outside before we implemented this in our main poultry yard.
For the second benefit, we add bird reflective tape to each of the post and cages! This creates the odd light reflections that keeps daytime predators away.
For the smaller areas, such as our 100’ perimeter run for meat chickens, we used bird netting propped up by t-post. The post were easy to put in the ground and move around, the bird netting tended to be annoying to move but it was effective. This was a quick solution while we were trying to source a guard goose below. Our guard rooster refused to stay with that flock…
Lights
Motion detection solar lights. We have added 4 of these, one on each side of the coop. Additionally they are located on the sides of the meat shaw while running our meat flock in the field.
You can buy these neat owls that are solar powered, make noise, and have eerie red lights coming from the eyes when triggered. I do not like setting the thing off. Currently I have placed it above the pergola in our garden to add another layer of nighttime owl defense.
Guardians
I have become a huge fan of the guard goose. So much so, we actually have 5 mixed in with our chickens and ducks. Our two mixed chinese and pilgrim geese are by far the loudest, most annoying, will wake you up in the middle of the night and absolutely prevent attacks. During the day, the other 3 will also be loud if an aerial predator is above them and the other poultry take note.
We have roosters, we have drakes also. When it was just our muscovy ducks we kept a drake for defence. When the flock was attacked, he was the only one who died but he served his flock. From what I have read a rooster would do the same…thus far we have not had a rooster that brave.
I will mention there are other forms of livestock guardians. All of which I have considered but we have not endeavor it. Guardian dogs are a popular option, as are llamas and donkeys. I have even considered guinea fowl because they are so loud and annoying. Our family chose the goose option since it was easy to incorporate into our system with minimal additional effort. The geese are also expert foragers
Conclusion
Do not let the fear of a predator prevent you from starting. Have a plan, and apply protective measures for your birds. Everything will not go perfectly, years later we still lose a couple birds here and there. This is always sad but the majority of the flock is safe. They stay within the boundaries of our applied methods allowing us to be relatively attack free in arguably a much more predator heavy area. And when you do have a loss, evaluate where the predator outsmarted you, and work to close that weakness.
Remember, the predator gets a vote!