Chickens?

Add hawks, eagles, and my own dogs to the mix.

If you have a lot of predators then make it a permanent coop with run and wrap it with 1/2” hardware cloth.

You have to have a fully enclosed cage (with roof) to pen them up every night or predators will take one per night. Within that cage you build a roost to keep their feet off the ground when they huddle together while sleeping.

Your concerns are definitely valid and you will struggle to keep them safe.

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If you have a lot of predators then make it a permanent coop with run and wrap it with 1/2” hardware cloth.

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I local farm store has chicken coops similar to the link for sale. The hardest critter to keep out would be the black/rat snakes. This along with fencing would make this pretty expensive to start. Where I live at we can have hens, but no roosters.

LINK

The summer heat is way worse for chickens than the cold. We don’t usually put a heat lamp in our coop unless it gets in the 20’s or below.

I would recommend you put your chickens in a mobile coop that you can pull around your yard. Obviously you need some space to do this, but it’s nice to give the chickens fresh grass every few days (versus being in one spot all the time which will quickly get very dirty and muddy). Ours is fully enclosed so it has kept predators out and we have all kinds of critters wandering and flying around our yard. I downloaded plans for it off of Etsy for $10. Search Etsy for mobile chicken coop and it’s the 8x10 one being sold by ReformedAcresShop. Plans were pretty easy to follow. Took a couple of weekends to complete. We put wheels on the back and a pull kit on the front to move it with. Both of those were from Chick Lifts (www.chicklifts.com). My only complaint about the coop is that water gets into the roost buckets when it rains hard. We just put a tarp over the back end of the coop with clamps and remove it once the rain is done. That keeps most of the rain out.

Chickens are fun to have but a fair amount of work. We check them daily and change their water, give them food as needed and move the coop every 2-3 days. Their eggs are much better than store bought though. I would recommend you get Rhode Island Red chickens to start with. They are very low maintenance and lay eggs almost year round. They usually lay one egg a day except in the winter. I would put a max of 6 chickens in the coop that we have. There are also some varieties of chicken that are more cold hardy than others so you could look into getting some of those if you’re worried about how they will deal with the winter weather. There is a ton of info online about raising chickens if you have more questions. Good luck!

I got 50 or so.

The best thing you can possibly tell yourself is that everything eats chicken. EVERYTHING.

I have 2 coops, 8x8 and 8x16(half is a storage). Both have fully enclosed runs, about 30x40 each.

The truth of it is, wherever you put a coop or run, there will be zero vegetation within a week. Chickens will absolutely demolish a landscape if forced to be in a run. If they can get out, they will. If they can't get out, they will find a way to get out. Then the problem, they need to find a way to get back in.

They are generally pretty hearty creatures, will eat all your leftovers and scraps. They are fun to watch, I call them dumb dinosaurs. Fresh eggs are amazing. We get about a dozen a day.

They shite everywhere. Strangely, the smell isn't bad at all. Ducks are 100x worse.

You will likely never break even on what they cost. I've lost 3 chickens this week, have traps out tonight to figure out what it is. One thing as well, if you have chickens, you have mice. No way around it.

I have a family of racoons that use to destroy my bird feeders at night. I had to hang the feeders where they could not get to them. I had talked my wife out of getting chickens after reading everyone's comments. I don't need to have another daily hassle to deal with plus I don't have the extra cash laying around to get everything.