How to keep your flock safe
Happy Hens!
Living in the country and keeping chickens alive is not an easy task!
It was a huge learning curve when to came to keeping our flock alive! But by the second round of chickens, we finally figured it out! We wanted to free range (which we do), but realized from dusk until dawn they needed more than just a coop! We live on a ranch with nothing near our house with a creek bed and fence line right behind the coop…so the were prime for the picking!
As read in previous posts, we created a run that had concrete below (to keep the critters from digging under) and hog wire on top to keep the hawks from getting them when they are still young. When we first got the chickens, I was literally have to trap raccoons and take care of them all the time because they would pick off the chickens one at a time (that is a whole story in itself entirely too graphic for blogging!)! It was so devastating! But after we put the run in that was concrete under the fence line and the coop backed up to an entirely enclosed run…they were finally safe! They do free range during the day, but we have the option to keep them in the enclosure when they are too small or if we will not be home by dusk to lock the predators out.
Farm girl living her best life!
Having chickens (at least for us), meant the start of more animals!
We started with chickens, which brought the snakes, so we added kittens, then goats, the more chickens, more goats, a dog and then more chickens!
Y’all I don’t do snakes! At all! I don’t even like to look at pictures of them, but here we are raising animals that attract them! Of course, they come around for the eggs…not the chickens! Which is totally unacceptable! Our girls work hard to make us eggs to eat…not for snakes to steal!
Some dear friends of mine were visiting the ranch one day and I was out showing their boys the chickens, you could imagine my surprise when I opened the coop at the nesting boxes and a GINORMOUS snake staring right at me! I quickly slammed the door shut! I ran inside the house and came back out with my pink .22! Now, keep in my my friends husband that was there is an active marine! He clearly could see I was determined to shoot the snake (which was an obvious wrong choice since the snake was in the coop)! So what did he do? Grabbed a knife and went into the inclosed coop with the snake and took care of business! Mindblowing!
Marine Marc to the rescue!
Now here is the most disgusting part, the snake clearly had 2 eggs in there! After killing the snake, he turned it upside down and the egg yolk came out of it!
So, moral of the story…have your husband and all male humans living on the ranch pee around the coop! I am not kidding! I did all kinds of research and have bought snake repellent (which I wanted to avoid using since the chickens are in the same space as where I would put it, but the one thing I found that worked the best is a little tinkle! Ha! Nothing funny than looking out your kitchen window seeing boots to the shuffle back and forth around the coop doing their business!
Also, if you stay tuned…you will find that the goats also help keep the predators away!