Lost Chickens

After about a year of keeping out chicken coop open all night, we lost a couple chickens and one rooster to a predator one night.

We don't know for sure what got them. In the morning, when Aaron and I were walking out to feed the pig, we saw a large number of feathers in a small area. It was far more than I'd seen in one place before. When we checked the coop, we were missing two hens and our favorite rooster, the maran. He was such a good rooster; he watched over the hens and he never gave us attitude.

We looked on the internet to see if we could figure out what got them based on the evidence we found; a little lost chicken forensics. I found http://www.raising-chickens.org/chicken-predators.html and http://countrysidenetwork.com/daily/poultry/chickens-101/what-killed-my-chicken/ to be very helpful. Based on what they said, it seemed like it would have been a fox or coyote because we saw no dead chickens or chicken parts left behind. But then I also noticed some scat on our patio area and after more research online (http://icwdm.org/inspection/Tubular.aspx and a Power Point from Penn State University) I identified it as raccoon scat. The research on predators indicated that raccoons typically leave part of the chickens behind, and all we found were feather. Maybe a raccoon caught them and an owl took the carcasses away. We'll never know for sure, but we will now be closing the coop at night!