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

).
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.