Hawks and Chickens...Very Bad Combo!

Today as I was preparing to make lunch, I looked out over our back yard...and I saw a dreadful site...a hawk with it's glorious wings spread over our beautiful brown chicken. Thankfully my husband had just gotten home, so after seeing me get all my feathers ruffled, he bounded to the back yard! We were able to rescue our chicken, and were so sad to realize that another one was missing...apparently the appetizer for the hawk. After some looking, and some tears from our littlest child, we were delighted to find our brown chicken was actually not as harmed as we had feared. In fact, it appears she is just fine! We watched the hawk sit and watch us. We looked in our many neighbors yard to see if our other dead chicken was there, or if the hawk had dropped her alive. It was not, so after getting the hens settled back into a locked inner coop within their pen, we set off on how to protect our gals from future attacks.

We ate lunch and I was feeling a bit gloomy...my kids each named their chicken...and we had no plans to eat these chickens, they were for eggs only, though we did say maybe in the future we would consume them. Now one child's was lunch for a hawk, or so we thought. Our yard is sparce, not much place for a hen to hide aside from the coop and ONE very small shrub. We have planted many things since we moved in, but they have not grown to a large size yet. So after we ate we went to talk about covering the chicken pen...and my husband gave the neighbors yard one more look over our 6' wooden fence. He was trying to get a view of a neighbors yard that was blocked by their shed and looked in the one tiny shrub that was in our yard in the corner...and much to our delight~it was Flour, our large white chicken! She is such a fun gal, and completely unharmed! It was such a blessing to not have lost one!

Living in the city affords us a lot of opportunity..like few raccoons and other animals that prey on chickens. We have a friend who has lost over 20 chickens to such things, as he lives in the "woods". But we got a good challenge with this Hawk!

So now we are going to cover our gals about 10' x 22' pen with plastic netting. That will allow them to get light and air, but keep the hawk away. Their coop is fenced on all sides, but it is too small to keep them in for their good health. We were having our hens in our yard (which caused so much damage, but they could hop their fence~another story!) so this solves two things...no more escapes into the yard and will keep them safer.

I do fear this upset will cause our hens to not lay. A huge bummer as they began only about a week or two ago laying! Time will tell.