The Accidental Smallholder Forum
Livestock => Poultry & Waterfowl => Topic started by: suziequeue on May 27, 2013, 01:49:11 pm
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We lost four hens to the fox last night. Interestingly - they were the the most recent additions to the flock. I post this up because the after action review reveals a couple of lessons which might be useful to others.
The chickens are free ranging during the day but are shut up at night. We have a timer pop-hole and I suspect what happened was that we haven't reset the timer since the days have got longer and the more recent arrivals didn't get into the house last night before the door closed.
I have expounded the virtues of timer pop-holes on this forum on a number of occasions and will continue to do so as I still think they are the best thing since sliced bread but I have learnt two lessons from this:
* We must do an evening check round after the pop hole has shut to round up any strays
* A regular check of the pop hole timer to ensure that it's not closing too early in the summer as the days lengthen.
So we still have eight left with the cockerel and two sitting on thirteen eggs (but I am not going to count my chickens just yet - we have a clutch of cream legbars due to hatch today :fc: :fc: ).
There were no carcasses at the scene - just four pools of feathers - but we found one that had been partially buried some yards away - presumably the fox (I am assuming it was a vixen feeding cubs as it's too early in the year for cubs to be out hunting themselves) was planning to return to it later..... and a head a little further away.
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Although sometimes the Fox will come out durring daylight hours....sad :(
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I too suffered a fox attack last night. I have had a trap baited for several weeks now but still not caught the bugger. He dug under the fence of one of my pens and took two 12 week old chicks. There were 5 in there and the remaining 3 are fine so I count myself lucky, especially as the two he took were both boys and he left the girls behind! They shall be moved into a different pen before nightfall.
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We've got ours back behind electric fencing which suits actually as we want to keep them off the reseeded lawn for now.
I think we will look at getting one if those light sensitive pop hole openers.
We've been thinking about restricting their movement for the first part of the day anyway in order to ensure the girls lay in the boxes.
Oh well - we live and learn.
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We hope to move........eventualy but our garden here in our town style house, is so safe as there is a wall all around, all the houses i love are open to the wide world so not so fox proof, my middle daughter who is on here sometimes, had the Fox visit often durring the day and just chop up her chucks...seems such a waste as its often not just for food!!
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Yes - I was surprised that there were no carcasses as I know foxes just kill for the ell of it and leave the carnage behind. The one carcass that was left behind had quite definitely been buried under some loose soil.
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We too had foxy visit just before 4 this morning......the birds are penned but having been out and rolling home :-[ oh didn't close them away....well they made such a racket and I looked out to see foxy loxy eyeing up breakfast....OH couldn't get shottie in time and she disappeared.....for now....sadly I know she'll be back
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I used to have the auto doors on all my houses & if you use the sensor setting make sure it doesn,t open to early on these lighter mornings if your pens are not fox proof.I lost birds one morning he was waiting for them to come out >:( I no longer use them
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Yes - I think we are going to move to having them behind the fence of a morning with a chance to get out after lunch.