lost half of my herd to hawks - thinking everything over

I got my long-awaited chickens 2,5 months ago. Two months of perfection, joy and fun.❤️ Chickens were roaming around, I adored the way they followed me wherever I went. I am a lone 60y old woman homesteading alone, and it was blissful to have 15 creatures to interact with as I have nobody really.

And then one went missing. No trace whatsoever. Next night, two more. A circle of feathers on the ground, nothing else.

I started building a protected run. Alone, it was real hard. I managed a mainly covered run with 6 foot fencing.then I spent hours chasing the chickens to move them to the new run. Managed 3. Next morning, no trace of them.

Panicked, I called several people to help with rounding up the chickens, but nobody had time. Next night, again a couple of chicken disappeared.

I was utterly exhausted and depressed. I tried to catch chickens from an 10 acre area. I fell down, panted, cried, tried again. I got hold of only one. I put her to the sauna and closed the door firmly. Felt really lousy: which chicken likes to live alone in a darkish room? Well, next night, the chickens I did not manage to catch disappeared. The familiar ominous circle of feathers left.  Even Roosters disappeared.

I had ordered a cover net for the new run and when it arrived I had the sauna chicken and one free-roaming left. My son  monitored the free-roaming one. We never saw her, but food disappeared from the cup and an egg appeared in the nest every day. My son spent hours waiting for her to appear and after persistent waiting   caught her when she came to lay an egg.

Our two remaining chickens were put into the new Alcatraz-level run. We got new chickens from three keepers.. They are getting along well after initial squabbling.

I feel sad for having to put them in a cage: it was so nice to have them roaming  around. But now they will survive.

Oh no, that's very sad! I'm planning to free-range my hens during the day once I get their house built and I sure hope I have better luck.

Hi Kaarina,
I'm so sorry to hear of the hawk troubles. It is difficult to lose animals. I know that there are a lot of people who free range their chickens, but I do not hear of very many that do it for a long time unless they are very close to the house or unless they have some sort of guardian (dog, goose, etc).

I don't know if it is true, but I have heard that crows will not allow hawks and the like in their area. I had crows living on my property and I only ever had one raptor attack the entire time I had chickens. They were fenced in on the sides and moved around, but there was no overhead netting at all. Maybe you could try attracting some crows? Of course, they might get into your garden, so that just change the problem.

BTW - I like your name. We named our daughter Karina, which I had never seen before you. It is not a very popular name in the US.

sorry to hear about your losses. we’ve kept chickens for around six years in an area with lots of predators. after a lot of trial and error and predation, our birds now spend the vast majority of their time in a fenced run with rotating access to other fenced runs. we also encourage crows, which really has helped get hawks chased off.

another thing we’ve done from time to time is part-day, somewhat supervised free-ranging. once the birds are used to going into their house on time in the evening, we would let them out for the last 2-3 hours before they’ll be putting themselves away anyway, usually while doing some outside work in the vicinity. haven’t done that in a while, though, since more young trees have been planted in the area of their runs and i get annoyed with them removing mulch .

real free-ranging without protective dogs or something similar (which i don’t have) is too risky for me, personally. my heart can’t take all the death.

Matt McSpadden wrote:Hi Kaarina,
There are a lot of people who free range their chickens, but I do not hear of very many that do it for a long time unless they are very close to the house or unless they have some sort of guardian (dog, goose, etc).

I don't know if it is true, but I have heard that crows will not allow hawks and the like in their area.

Matt, now that I have started looking, I find the same. Free-ranging works if your yeard is small or in suburbia. But for a farm in the countryside, it seems most folks make the same mistake as I did. For a while, everything is just idyllic, until hawk babies startgrowing and the family needs lots of food...

I know crows chase many predators away. Buthow do I attract them?? I very much doubt that there are zero companies selling crows, chicks or adults 😄

greg mosser wrote:
we’ve done part-day, somewhat supervised free-ranging. once the birds are used to going into their house on time ireal free-ranging without protective dogs or something similar (which i don’t have) is too risky for me, personally. my heart can’t take all the death.

Greg, I will try to let them loose in the vegetable garden, which adjourns their run and is fenced (rabbits&deer). Cannot do it yet, as the chickens have been here only a few days and they do not know my commands yet.

I know what you mean by saying your heartcan't take it. ❤️

Christopher Weeks wrote: I'm planning to free-range my hens during the day

Chris, I think free-ranging them is OK if
- your farm is small enough that you can see or hear them
- they will come when called

My chickens were roaming in 10 acres of orchard, vegetable gardens, forest and yard. Often I would not see some of them for an entire day - and then they would appear with a mouse hanging in their mouth.They also took some excessive liberties with my herb garden (=some plants were eaten down to the ground). If you try to restrict them to a smallish area, you will get lots of fertilisation under convenient roosting spots.

But if you do not have predators, go for it!@

Kaarina Kreus wrote:

I know crows chase many predators away. But how do I attract them??  

Be careful what you wish for.  Two springs ago, Ravens killed every single young duck I let out even though they had moms with them. Birds that should have been safe at the size they were. But the Ravens were tag-teeming and without a dog to chase them off, youngsters didn't have a chance.

Area Ravens have been going in through pop-doors and stealing eggs from local farm flocks.

Yes, crows are smaller and not quite as smart as Ravens, but they will still happily eat a chicken if it's served on the buffet!

I typically catch chickens at night, or bait them with food. Chasing never worked well for me.

i feed crows on a platform some 200 meters from my chicken enclosure. i do it often enough that they nest on a neighboring hillside - it’s really their protectiveness of their nests that makes them vigilant for hawks. my main chicken run is actually open on top and the crows come and visit the chickens most mornings, probably to steal some of the scraps that the chickens get. they don’t do it when i’m around, and they certainly haven’t bothered the chickens themselves. i’m okay with a little bit of that kind of ‘crow tax’.  jay has a good point, though, and if i regularly had ravens at my altitude what i’ve been doing probably wouldn’t work as well.

it’s probably worth noting that anything involving younger birds/brooding/etc happens in a more fortified enclosure that crows can’t get into at all.

When one of my geese went broody this year, a crow would come around and eat a goose egg a few times a week. Since she wasn't very serious about brooding until much later in the year than was healthy, and since none of the eggs were fertile, I didn't mind the crow. I would still enjoy it coming around, but I'm not yet to wanting to build a crow feeding station, nor do we have it come around often enough to work on training it that we're "Crow Minded People", so I figure that's a "future me's" problem.

I have a flock of chickens that free-ranges a decently sized yard, but I had our little plot cross-fenced back when we decided to raise chickens, so there's always been fencing up for them. They frequently wander outside of it, and have never wandered far, but they have a good 1/4 acre for their wandering.
Even with fences up, I have lost birds to neighborhood dogs that squeezed themselves inside the fence, or dogs picking them off outside the fence. I have a live trap that I set whenever I lose too many birds in a short period of time - it seems that everything LOVES to eat chicken!

I've lost chicks to just about everything you can think of, and regularly lose a bird to dogs, hawks, eagles, opossums, cats, raccoons, and have had a bobcat wipe out a new flock back when I first getting started with chickens, 20 years ago.  You don't get used to losing chickens, but you do develop ways of coping with them going missing.
The first years are really hard, unless you are in a suburban area, because you will make mistakes and you will lose chickens.  There's only so much you can do to keep them safe. You are taking the steps you can, and making the adjustments you can.  

I like your set up with separate roost space and nest boxes. That's what I set up for my flock, and they really seem to enjoy it. They have places to hide from the weather and each other scattered through the yard, and they have enough to peck and scratch that there's always greenery for protection from raptors. The flight netting will help.
Once they're trained up a bit, you will find it easy and fun to garden with your flock, letting them have garden time while you're with them. My geese have learned that they get to help weed, can eat the peppermint, and play in the water while I garden, so they join me for Garden Goose Time. They listen to commands, too, and the chickens don't.
I have the geese to be flock guardians and, while I tease them about it, they are good at it. I still lose chickens because they will go do chicken things where the geese can't help, but I lose a lot fewer of them. The geese are great at making a lot of noise, too, so when there's something going on, I know about it.

Joseph Lofthouse wrote:I typically catch chickens at night, or bait them with food. Chasing never worked well for me.

So right! Chasing a tiny, finicky, agile bird who can easily fly 30 feet is a losing game. Can you picture me, 60y old robustish breasty and buttocky woman, running around the orchard with a raised scoop net? It would have been the meme of the year 😄

Found a post by Timothy Markus:"I u"sed to free-range my layers but I found feeding the local wildlife to be expensive, though I did get to see a bald eagle 10 feet away.