In broad daylight…

So I got a message from Cindy to call her which is generally never a good thing.  As she was crying, she told me she couldn’t find Cocoa but did find a large collection of feathers behind the coop.  When she sent me a picture of the feathers I knew it was not going to be a good scenario.  There were a lot of them and a trail leading towards the back of the yard.  It seemed pretty obvious one of our chickens was killed by a predator, the question was what kind and how.

My first suspicion was a coyote although typically they are nocturnal predators.  A couple weeks ago our neighbor called me one morning saying he saw a coyote in the back of his property that he scared away. He said it was headed towards our yard.  Of course this news made Cindy and I nervous but we said the chickens have a lot of spaces to hide around the property, thinking that would hopefully be adequate to keep predators at bay combined with our fence.  Unfortunately research showed us that a 4 foot fence is nothing for a coyote to jump over.

So based on where the feathers were I told Cindy that we may be able to see something on one of the coop cameras.  Cindy started reviewing the footage and found a very tragic event right around 7:15AM where you can see Cocoa being carried off by a fcking coyote.  It was a tragic confirmation of one of Cindy and my worst fears when it came to the chickens.

Long time blog readers may recall how much we were affected when our original three chickens, Betty, Wilma, and Pebbles were killed one night by a raccoon that figured out how to open the side doors of our original chicken tractor.  It was their death that made me spend so much time, money and effort constructing the new chicken housing to be pretty much predator proof, which it is, the only problem is the hens are only in there at night.

During the day we have left the birds free range pretty much from sunrise to sunset.  Our success with doing so for the past year or so may have lulled us into a false sense of security.  The realist in me knew this was always a possibility.  Pretty much every source you can find will tell you that if you let your chickens free range it is not a matter of if but when you will lose some to predators. As you can imagine, I feel guilty and very sad that despite both my and Cindy’s efforts to give the hens a safe environment we failed, even if it is just the course of nature taking place.

So now the question is what do we do.  The safest option of course is to keep the chickens contained  in their safe haven 24/7 but I have never been a fan of that approach.  I always felt that the birds having a high quality of life trumped a life of captivity, even if they are kept in the relatively large confines of their coop and outdoor run. I could attempt to live trap the coyote but from what I read they are very tough to trap in a cage like I used to catch the raccoons.  I could try to run an electric wire around the top of the fence but I’m not sure how effective it would be.  I read situations where coyotes cleared a five foot fence (mine is four) without touching it. I could somehow expand onto the outdoor run area of the chicken coop but nothing will match the freedom they have now of course.

Usually in most situations it does not take me very long to evaluate a situation and come up with a viable solution.  This is one of those times that solution is not clear to me.  All I know is Cocoa is gone and the predator that did it is surely going to try again so something needs to change before that happens.