Bring on the raccoons!

After losing the last flock to raccoons, I'm determined to foil every kind of fowl hunter short of a human with tools. Some people say that, given enough time, a hungry raccoon can get into any chicken house. But the logician in me says that simply cannot be true. I mean, give me a frickin' break, they're not little Houdini animals!

Anyway, my design and construction criteria with regards to the chicken run and hen house have been to make the whole thing stout enough to prevent a human from getting in without tools. So I'm treating a hungry raccoon as if it were a hungry human. If either one wants my chickens bad enough to bring along and use tools, then, well, I guess they can have them.

The major design flaw in the previous coop was that I only stapled the chicken wire to the wood frame. There were numerous places where the raccoons simply ripped the staples out of the wood and pulled back the chicken wire. To overcome this, I re-stapled the chicken wire, but this time I added a strip of wood (1/2" PT plywood or strips of cedar boards) on top of the staples, screwed or nailed down. This way, no amount of pulling on the wire will separate it from the wooden frame. The raccoons would first have to remove the wood strips (meaning they'd need a square-drive screwdriver or drill and a prybar or claw hammer) to separate the chicken wire from the frame.

Another design flaw which the raccoons didn't need to explore was that I didn't bury the chicken wire too well under the fence. With a few inches of digging, a raccoon could go under the fence. To remedy this, I dug a large trench around the entire perimeter of the run and buried two feet of chicken wire, backfilling with gravel and dirt. I'm confident that a raccoon cannot simply dig down two-and-a-half feet, to go under the wire because at that depth, you're into compacted gravel laid down by the Missoula Floods. Again, tools are needed to defeat that security measure.

The final design flaw was the latch system on the run and the hen house. For the run, I've never used locks, but I do use two sliding latches, one near the top, one near the bottom. Both of them have to be open for the gate to move. It's possible a raccoon could climb up the fencing to open the upper one, but if I ever notice that one has been opened, I'll use some locks. It also helps that the door is a little out of plumb so you have to kick it open even after the latches are opened since it sticks on the frame a bit. Lily can't open it, so I think the coons will have a hard time. The hen house latch is still just a long pin, held in place by the friction of the latch flap. I want to put in a small locking carabiner (one of those fake ones you can pick up at the counter at REI) on that latch, which should be a reasonably sufficient deterrent.

All in all, it was about three full days of work to get the place up to snuff enough to move the chickens in. I've got two infrared heat lamps on in the nights since it's been hovering around freezing recently, and they're fairing well. I didn't move them in until they were fully feathered. They've eaten all the grass in the run, and stripped the few blackberry brambles of their leaves which is pretty effective for keeping the blackberries at bay. We cleaned out the freezer recently and found some ugly cranberries left over from Thanksgiving which the chickens really enjoyed.

I'm looking forward to the eggs!