Security

Predators are all over the place and they'd love to get their little paws and jaws around our chickens, if they could.  We've seen coyote, fox, and raccoons in our neighborhood.  There are hawks flying overhead.  Less threatening to the chickens, but still present, are squirrels and skunks.  We have to take precautions to protect the girls.  As mentioned in another post, we have wire cloth buried one foot under the chicken run, and it wraps around the entire thing.  Red Door Coop is a mesh box reinforced by a variety of wood and screws.  Not to mention the latches, carabiners, and long nails to secure every door. 

Each of the two main doors has two latches that look like this.  At night we secure them with a carabiner and a long nail.  It can be tedious to lock and unlock them, but it is worth it to protect our chickens.  See Bill right there?  Adorable. 

Under the coop, a favorite spot for the chickens in the heat of the day, is a secure and shady place to rest.  The wire cloth that is buried underground wraps up and is stapled to the bottom of the coop and then reinforced with a piece of wood over the seam.  You can just see Fitz and Bill under there.

On a recent weekend we caged Fitz and Bill (Lou and Bruiser hadn't joined the family yet) in the yard while we did some landscaping around the coop, assuming that they would not like the roto-tiller running right next to their faces!  We put them in a much less secure spot than their coop. Since we were there to supervise, it was all good.


*A side note about predators---yesterday while we were out for a run, we spotted a young deer with  nice velvety antlers munching up a garden.  Well, the deer saw us and decided it wanted to go for a run and began chasing us!  We finally lost it by hiding up the steps and in the entryway of a neighborhood church.  It was a fitness-minded predator.*