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John K Jordan
12-02-2019, 11:34 PM
One of my favorite chickens was attacked by a red-tailed hawk today. I heard the commotion and ran up the hill and chased the hawk away.

At first examination it looked like one eye was missing but I think it's OK under an abraded eyelid. There were two places on the chest where skin was sliced but no other tissue damage (a hawk strike usually results in deep puncture/slicing wounds). I couldn't find my suture kit so I pulled the skin together, maybe 1/2", and held it together with superglue. Disinfected with diluted iodine solution, the same as with most animal wounds.

She has been resting in a plastic tub in the shop with gentle heat from heat lamp, calm but still alert almost 12 hours after the encounter. I'll see tomorrow if she makes it through the night.

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I know hawks have to eat too but I prefer they go to a different restaurant!

JKJ

Mel Fulks
12-03-2019, 12:32 AM
John, If the chicken is a favorite of yours, I'm betting it's lovely , good natured and good at making eggs. I hope she is not badly hurt.

Rob Luter
12-03-2019, 6:32 AM
Nature is a tough town. Hoping she pulls through.

Frederick Skelly
12-03-2019, 6:34 AM
Sorry to hear this. How is she this morning John?

Tom M King
12-03-2019, 8:32 AM
Best of luck!!

Eric Danstrom
12-03-2019, 8:58 AM
I hope she's ok. I have a dog that scans the sky for birds of prey and reacts on sight (balloons, drones and stray bags too). Many chicken herders use them to protect thier flocks. I adopted a hard-to-place Pyrenees-Labrador dog. Long story short I had no idea about the incredible instincts breed into these dogs for over 4000 years. If you want 24/7 protection of your flock a Pyrenees derivative dog is a good choice. Foxes, coyotes, raccons, stray dogs hawks, eagles are all innately reacted to. They also make great human companions.

Jim Becker
12-03-2019, 9:37 AM
Infection and blood loss are very difficult for birds...hopefully, she will pull through.

michael langman
12-03-2019, 9:52 AM
Hope she pulls through John. Hawks and falcons can be a real destroyer of life for our feathered friends.
Our place is a wintering yard for hundreds of birds, and the hawks do take advantage.
A female peregrine left her siblings here to take advantage of the many birds we have, last spring. They stayed for months.
Life is Hard.

John K Jordan
12-03-2019, 11:59 AM
The chicken is still alive and seems in better spirits today, more vocal and active!

She was trying to open her damaged eye, a good sign. The skin I glued together is is still in place. Infection is still a possibility, of course, but at least there was no detectable blood loss.

This bird is one of the dozen or so I kept from my first incubator run. When the chicks were small I put them in an out building. I came to sit in the doorway a couple of times a day and a bunch of the birds, including this one, became quite friendly, would jump up on my knee so they could see outside better. I carried some around the barnyard to see the llamas and guineas. One gentleman who bought a bunch sent back a photo of the birds following him around - he was so happy to get chickens that he could handle.

I'm considering putting up a spare canopy frame inside the chicken yard in the biggest open area where I've seen two hawk strikes. Maybe cover it with netting or even the tarp for additional dry space when it's raining.

Mike Henderson
12-03-2019, 12:00 PM
Chickens can be tough. Look up how you caponize a male chicken - the testes are inside the rib cage. We used to do that in the chickenyard and just put vaseline on the wound. And it's both sides. Had very few failures (where the capon died).

Mike

Tom M King
12-03-2019, 12:12 PM
Glad to hear the good news!

Michael Weber
12-03-2019, 1:53 PM
Speaking of friendly chickens
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Jim Koepke
12-03-2019, 5:16 PM
Good luck with your chicken John. Glad to hear she is doing better.

Our last chicken was attacked by a raccoon and did not do as well as yours.

jtk

Mark Bolton
12-03-2019, 5:55 PM
Its hard to beat mother nature. Its a process not for the faint of heart. Trying to stop/slow it is a major major battle.

Bill Bukovec
12-03-2019, 8:16 PM
I hope she pulls through. We had been letting our hens free range evenings, but a hawk has been hanging around lately. A coworker lost a chicken to a hawk yesterday. They said the hawk was not afraid of humans. I may need to build a "chicken tractor" (portable covered pen) next spring so the "girls" can exercise their drum sticks.��

Tom M King
12-03-2019, 9:55 PM
We have so many foxes that we can't let ours out at all.

Steve Demuth
12-05-2019, 12:28 PM
We have so many foxes that we can't let ours out at all.

When we raised chickens (they left when my son went to college, and my wife switched the on farm menu to all-vegetarian), it was raccoons. We lost an occassional bird to a fox, but if you didn't have the chickens, ducks and geese locked in at nightfall and until full dawn, the 'coons ravaged them. And the lock-up better be good. A raccoon will intelligently disassemble any makeshift or vulnerable enclosure, whereas a fox pretty much requires the door to be open in order to dine.

Steve Demuth
12-05-2019, 12:33 PM
One of my favorite chickens was attacked by a red-tailed hawk today. I heard the commotion and ran up the hill and chased the hawk away.


JKJ

Watched this play out in our front yard five feet from the big picture windows that overlook our farm some years ago. Red-tail stooped onto a massive red rooster, got his talons into the birds back and tried to take off. Too much rooster for the hawk, so 30 seconds of the chicken struggling and the hawk trying to disengage his talons. Then 30 seconds more of the rooster giving as good as he got before I opened the door and the hawk took off.

The rooster fathered many more chicks before a much bigger "bird" of prey may chicken soup of him.

I so miss home-made chicken noodle soup. Most of the rest of what having a vegetarian head of household takes off the menu, I can take, leave, or get in an occassional dining out. There is no replacement for home made chicken noodle soup made from old chickens with home made noodles.

John K Jordan
12-05-2019, 6:54 PM
Watched this play out in our front yard ...

I watched a hawk dive for a pet rabbit once. I had an aging pair and when one died I let the other out in the llama pasture on occasion when I was at the barn. The hawk came from a tall tree with talons in strike position. Before it struck an adult peacock maybe 20' away jumped off a stump and drove the hawk away. I was astonished. But thinking about it, the peacock is massive compared to the hawk and may have been a frightening sight to the little hawk. It's amazing how well peafowl can fly - I counted 6 wing strokes to get a big male from the ground to the barn roof, maybe 25' up. A baby can fly just a few days after hatching.

For some reason I've lost no chickens to raccoons in the dozen+ years I've had the chickens. Maybe it's because the raccoons that come around are attracted to the peanut butter in the live traps. A friend lost about 15 chickens to some predator that was getting inside his pen and coop, he thought it was a raccoon - I set up a trap and caught a 'possum inside the coop.

JKJ

Tom M King
12-05-2019, 7:58 PM
Decades ago, before I had learned the hard lessons of just how secure a chicken coop, and pen needed to be, I heard a commotion in the henhouse on my way out to the barn, one night. I opened the door to the henhouse, and there was a 'possum sitting up on one of the roosting poles with the chickens, eating an egg. He was holding the egg in his little front paws, and doing a neat job of eating it from a hole in the top of the egg. The chickens were now very calmly roosting, right beside him.

I didn't want to shoot a gun in there with the chickens, not knowing what the noise would do to the chickens, so I went back in the house, and came out with a baseball bat. I didn't want to hit him hard enough to make a mess, but thought surely I had hit it in the head hard enough to kill it. He fell to the ground from the roost. I decided to just leave him until the next morning, to serve him to the local vultures.

I went out the next morning, and the 'possum was gone. That one never came back though.

Mike Henderson
12-05-2019, 8:21 PM
A feral cat got in to our baby chicks one time. He just killed each one and stacked them in a pile. I discovered him after he had killed maybe 20 chicks. I quickly left and got the .22 and went back to the chicken house. I buried the cat and the dead chicks together.

Mike

[We also occasionally had a snake get into the chicken house. If we had baby chicks, the snake would swallow several baby chicks whole. Other times, it would swallow several eggs whole. I understand that the snake would then wrap itself around a post and break the eggs. Never saw that but was told that (about breaking the eggs).]

Steve Demuth
12-05-2019, 9:41 PM
Yeah, I have seen possums "roosting" with the chickens on cold nights, and they stole eggs from time to time. I can't bring myself to kill a 'possum, though. They just seem so damned innocent to me. They come up and steal the cats food all the time, if we don't make sure the dish is inside or empty at night. The other night I went out to get the cat's dish, reached into the cat hut blind, and grabbed a possum by the nose. Fortunately, he was a startled as me, and didn't bite.

If they get to a big problem, I just poke 'em, they go dead (play 'possum") and I carry them out into the woods and let 'em go.

Steve Demuth
12-05-2019, 9:43 PM
[We also occasionally had a snake get into the chicken house. If we had baby chicks, the snake would swallow several baby chicks whole. Other times, it would swallow several eggs whole. I understand that the snake would then wrap itself around a post and break the eggs. Never saw that but was told that (about breaking the eggs).]

And skunks. Skunks love a baby chick or fresh egg.

All reasons the coop had to be locked up by dusk.

Steve Demuth
12-05-2019, 9:52 PM
I watched a hawk dive for a pet rabbit once. I had an aging pair and when one died I let the other out in the llama pasture on occasion when I was at the barn. The hawk came from a tall tree with talons in strike position. Before it struck an adult peacock maybe 20' away jumped off a stump and drove the hawk away. I was astonished. But thinking about it, the peacock is massive compared to the hawk and may have been a frightening sight to the little hawk. It's amazing how well peafowl can fly - I counted 6 wing strokes to get a big male from the ground to the barn roof, maybe 25' up. A baby can fly just a few days after hatching.

For some reason I've lost no chickens to raccoons in the dozen+ years I've had the chickens. Maybe it's because the raccoons that come around are attracted to the peanut butter in the live traps. A friend lost about 15 chickens to some predator that was getting inside his pen and coop, he thought it was a raccoon - I set up a trap and caught a 'possum inside the coop.

JKJ

Your peacock story brings to mind the way our llamas protect sheep against coyotes. They don't actually have to do anything - they just live out with the sheep, and when anything they don't recognize comes into the pasture, walk deliberately toward it, and it freaks the predator out.

But raccoons - man. Smart, charming, and infuriatingly destructive. One night years ago I was wakened by a banging in the bedroom window. A racoon kit was clinking to screen with his claws stuck, just shaking it back and forth. I went out to knock him off, found his mama sitting in a walnut tree, 15' up, pulling a hummingbird feeder hung by a rope up hand over hand. She just calmly finished retrieving it and started licking sugar water out of it, right in the center of my flashlight beam.

Had another one, back when we had a goose sitting a clutch, dug under the batten foundation of the building the goose was sheltered in, made a hole in the bottom of the nest, and rolled almost the entire clutch of half-incubated eggs out from under the sitting goose. Broken eggs and half eaten embryos all over the yard the next morning, and the goose still sitting, on one lone egg.

If there is a meal to be had at a farmers expense, a raccoon will figure out how to get it.

Mike Henderson
12-05-2019, 11:32 PM
Yeah, I have seen possums "roosting" with the chickens on cold nights, and they stole eggs from time to time. I can't bring myself to kill a 'possum, though. They just seem so damned innocent to me. They come up and steal the cats food all the time, if we don't make sure the dish is inside or empty at night. The other night I went out to get the cat's dish, reached into the cat hut blind, and grabbed a possum by the nose. Fortunately, he was a startled as me, and didn't bite.

If they get to a big problem, I just poke 'em, they go dead (play 'possum") and I carry them out into the woods and let 'em go.

Yeah, we have possums here. They're pretty harmless - they're nature's garbage men. Every now and then the dog will catch one (especially little ones) but I always collect and release. The dog doesn't try to kill them. He just collects them and brings them to me. He seems to hold them gently in his mouth. Kind of strange but I'm glad he doesn't kill them.

Here's a picture of my wife holding a little one in her hands. The dog had brought him to me. You can see his fur is wet from the dog's mouth. They're really cute.

Mike

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Ken Fitzgerald
12-05-2019, 11:57 PM
A few years ago my wife decided she wanted to feed the local birds especially during the winter months. About 2 years into it, during the winter once in a while I'd see a hawk nail a bird from the feeder. Then the following spring it became a regular event. One night sitting on the patio swing, she and I saw one dive, drive a bird to the ground, reposition it's grasp and take it for dinner. A few weeks later the youngest son and his wife were visiting. Sitting at the dining room table I told the son about the hawk harvesting birds from the feeder. While we were sitting there talking about it, a hawk did, in fact, harvest a finch. My son and I teased my wife on how the hawks really appreciated her luring the small birds to make the hawks hunts easier. When the large bag of bird seed was emptied, she removed the feeder and gave up the hobby.

Tom M King
12-06-2019, 8:26 AM
If you have horses, opossums are not exactly harmless. They are the only carriers of EPM. We have 150 acres of woodland, they are welcome to stay there, in complete freedom. Once they start coming to the barn, or the yards, they don't stop coming back, and crap all over everywhere, like smaller rodents do, only more productive. Vultures have to eat too.

Jim Becker
12-06-2019, 9:54 AM
Opossums are important creatures...our only marsupial in North America and they are gentle, voracious consumers of ticks and other nasty things. Yea, they might want a nice egg meal occasionally if one keeps chickens and other fowl (something that can largely be guarded against), but they are worthy members of the local ecosystem.

Ken Fitzgerald
12-06-2019, 12:00 PM
Opossums are important creatures...our only marsupial in North America and they are gentle, voracious consumers of ticks and other nasty things. Yea, they might want a nice egg meal occasionally if one keeps chickens and other fowl (something that can largely be guarded against), but they are worthy members of the local ecosystem.


Don't ask a Kiwi what they think about possums. Drivers there will swerve across the road to hit one should it crawl out on the road.

Rob Luter
12-06-2019, 12:35 PM
Decades ago, before I had learned the hard lessons of just how secure a chicken coop, and pen needed to be, I heard a commotion in the henhouse on my way out to the barn, one night. I opened the door to the henhouse, and there was a 'possum sitting up on one of the roosting poles with the chickens, eating an egg. He was holding the egg in his little front paws, and doing a neat job of eating it from a hole in the top of the egg. The chickens were now very calmly roosting, right beside him.

I didn't want to shoot a gun in there with the chickens, not knowing what the noise would do to the chickens, so I went back in the house, and came out with a baseball bat. I didn't want to hit him hard enough to make a mess, but thought surely I had hit it in the head hard enough to kill it. He fell to the ground from the roost. I decided to just leave him until the next morning, to serve him to the local vultures.

I went out the next morning, and the 'possum was gone. That one never came back though.

I always found opossums to be indiscriminate killers. We had more that one decimate our henhouse when I was a kid. We'd follow the feather trail back to the tree they were nesting in and extract them from their lair with buckshot. A ball bat just make them curl up and play dead. I was raised to be a live and let live guy (and still am), but on the farm two critters were exterminated with extreme prejudice: Rats and 'Possums.

Mike Henderson
12-06-2019, 2:53 PM
I always found opossums to be indiscriminate killers. We had more that one decimate our henhouse when I was a kid. We'd follow the feather trail back to the tree they were nesting in and extract them from their lair with buckshot. A ball bat just make them curl up and play dead. I was raised to be a live and let live guy (and still am), but on the farm two critters were exterminated with extreme prejudice: Rats and 'Possums.

I grew up on a poultry farm and we never had problems with possums - and there were possums in the woods near us. Most of our problems were with feral dogs and cats. Occasionally snakes but that was few and far between. I don't ever remember a possum coming into the hen house. But if they did, I'd expect them to go for the chicken feed, rather than the chickens. They're much more scavengers than killers.

I'd have to shoot the dogs and cats. They would just keep coming back. The dogs ran in packs but the cats would be solitary.

Mike

John K Jordan
12-06-2019, 7:19 PM
A feral cat got in to our baby chicks one time. He just killed each one and stacked them in a pile. I discovered him after he had killed maybe 20 chicks. I quickly left and got the .22 and went back to the chicken house. I buried the cat and the dead chicks together.

Mike

[We also occasionally had a snake get into the chicken house. If we had baby chicks, the snake would swallow several baby chicks whole. Other times, it would swallow several eggs whole. I understand that the snake would then wrap itself around a post and break the eggs. Never saw that but was told that (about breaking the eggs).]

Twice I've caught black snakes in the nest boxes in the chicken house. One had an egg halfway in it's mouth - I pulled out the egg but missed the opportunity for a great picture. The other had just swallowed an egg and I could feel at least one crushed egg further down it's length. I read that snakes have bony projections on their spine which break the eggs when they contract powerful muscles.

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The worst was a big black snake who chased two peahens off a clutch of about 30 eggs so all the embryos died. I found the snake in the nest box. Peafowl eggs are WAY too big for a black snake so it was just curled around one egg, probably thinking frustrated snake thoughts.

All snakes get moved to a friends place about two miles away.

And I had a skunk dig under the wall at the peacock house, climb up on the roost, and grab and eat part of a young female. This made me unhappy, for one thing they are worth at least $100 each. The next day that skunk went to skunk heaven, or wherever skunks go.

JKJ

John K Jordan
12-06-2019, 7:23 PM
If you have horses, opossums are not exactly harmless. They are the only carriers of EPM. We have 150 acres of woodland, they are welcome to stay there, in complete freedom. Once they start coming to the barn, or the yards, they don't stop coming back, and crap all over everywhere, like smaller rodents do, only more productive. Vultures have to eat too.


I'm aware of the 'possum horse problem. Any that hang around the barn or poultry houses get to visit the live traps. I once caught 6 possums in the barn in 7 evenings. The turkey vultures here love them too.

JKJ

Jim Koepke
12-07-2019, 5:24 PM
It is always something. When we had chickens there was close mesh wire cloth at the bottom of the hen house to keep out various animals. The door latch was made to be a bit beyond the abilities of the local chicken preditors. They mostly went missing when outside for the day.

After a while the chicken feed on the ground attracted mice and rats. We started trapping the rodents. Then the weasels came to eat the dead rodents. Often they would drag the trap off into their tunnels. We attached light chain to the traps and secured them to the walls.

Eventually after the last chicken succumbed to a raccoon attack the rodent population left and took the weasels with them.

jtk

Tom M King
12-07-2019, 6:31 PM
I could very easily do without the chickens too, but most of us understand the "happy Wife" thing. Since I replaced the roof on the chicken house with standing seam metal last Spring, I guess we'll have chickens here as long as we're here. I didn't want to have to redo the roof again though.