Save Our Hens!

If you were following, we put 42 of our eggs on the incubator and 25 hatched out.  We have lost quite a few birds lately to predation.  Of the 25 that hatched, 5 of them did not make it.  The 20 that remain are doing well and are growing.  Odds tell you that of the 20, about half will be egg laying hens to replenish our flock.  and the other half will be made into gumbo, ha ha!

Ten hens doesn't quite replace what we've lost lately.  I think we've lost five alone in the last two weeks.  So on March 10th, I put another 42 fertilized (I hope) eggs on the incubator.  I think they are fertilized.  It is springtime and the roosters have been very... let's say romantically inclined out in the pasture.  We'll have more chicks hatching out on March 31st.  

So what is killing our hens?  I can't say for sure.  Something nocturnal.  All the deaths are at night.  We find the carcass in the morning.  The bird's carcass is intact, but the head is missing.  A neighbor stopped by today and told me he lost 30 of his hens to MINKS.  He told me that he through the headless chickens in a cage trap and the mink came back to eat the chicken and that's how he caught them.  I don't know what's killing ours, but I aim to stop it with a two-pronged attack.

First, since they are killing at night, we've begun locking up all our hens in the henhouse at dusk.  I worked on the hinges to a little side door so that it opens and shuts.  You can see the door in the photo below behind LuLu.  The hens go into the door each evening and we walk out there, check to see that none are out, and then we close the door up behind them.  Safe and secure for the night.  A mandated curfew, you might say.

I also set another cage trap in the woods behind the hen house.  Almost immediately I caught a possum.

He's got to go.

But the more I read about it, possums don't eat the head off of chickens.  That's more the calling card of raccoons and minks.  Those are harder to trap than the poor, hapless possum.  We've added another layer of defense.  Besides locking the hens up and setting traps, we're placing Belle, our Great Pyrenees dog, out by the barn every night to keep her eyes on things.

Chicken feed is expensive.  Eggs are expensive.  We can't afford to have predators take our hens.