Chicks, Snakes, Raccoons, Coyotes, and One Tough Rhode Island Red

This spring our chicks are getting ready to move from the brooder into a chicken tractor that I’ll be building next week. I’ll post a few pictures once it’s finished. It’s not overly complicated — just a simple rectangular box with metal roofing on top, framed with 1x1s and covered with 1/4-inch hardware cloth.

This year we picked up three Barred Rocks, three Rhode Island Reds, and three Orpingtons. From last year’s flock, we only have three remaining: two Leghorns that are laying beautiful extra-large eggs, and one Rhode Island Red that’s about six years old now. She has survived countless attacks on the chicken coop over the years. She’s definitely the survivor of the bunch.

Last year was extremely difficult with our chickens. We started the season like we usually do by buying replacement chicks. We had nine of them in the brooder, and while I was cleaning it out one day, I left the top unattended for probably an hour. Along came a black snake that slipped inside and ate one of the chicks.

After that, I moved the remaining chicks from the brooder into the grow-house, which is actually the old chicken coop we built back in 2006. Everything went fine for a couple of weeks, but then the same snake showed up again and killed three of our Rhode Island Reds, taking us from eight birds down to five.

At that point, we still had five older chickens in the main coop, aka, the egg-mobile, so we integrated the younger birds with them. The summer progressed fairly well after that, but sometime around August we got hit hard again. The first attack came from a mink that got into the coop, and after that we had several raccoon attacks. I trapped two raccoons and got them out of here, but a third one came through and killed three more chickens.

We were doing everything we could to get the situation under control, and at this point the chicken coop security system is pretty robust. To make matters worse, we had one rooster left, and after I finally got the coop secured, we continued letting the chickens free range outside the fencing during the day. One afternoon a coyote came through and snatched up the rooster, which left us with the three birds we still have today.

One of the changes we decided to make was with the location of the egg mobile. Originally, we had been moving it out onto the pastures behind the sheep, but that put the chickens farther away from the house and made it harder to keep an eye on them. Instead, we’ve decided to keep them closer to the farmstead in a small pasture that we already use for light grazing and as a sacrificial pasture during dry periods. The plan now is to keep the chickens in that area and simply move them every couple of months so they don’t wear out one particular spot.

I also made several upgrades to the fencing around the chicken tractor. I added extra step-in posts along the poultry netting so raccoons couldn’t find low spots and crawl underneath. Even though the charger puts out two joules, it still wasn’t enough to fully discourage raccoons. By adding additional posts between the fiberglass supports that come with the netting, it made the fence much tighter and harder for predators to push under.

Another thing I had to do was seal up every opening where snakes could get inside. I used spray foam insulation to fill gaps, then covered those spots with strips and small squares of hardware cloth secured in place with a staple gun.

So far, things have been going well, but anyone who has raised chickens for any length of time knows that eventually predators will find a way to test your system.

Hopefully next week I’ll have the new chicken tractor finished, and I’ll post some pictures of it once it’s done. Right now the plan is to keep the young chickens in the tractor close to the house. Later on, I’ll move them beside the main coop — or “egg mobile” — so the two groups can get used to one another. Once they’ve adjusted, I’ll move the younger birds out of the tractor and into the main flock.