During the summer months on average we have 500 happy production red hens running all over. I love to see the girls chasing bugs and enjoying the freedom to scratch around. We work to train the girls to go to a nice cozy barn at night, and usually they do a pretty good job. Lately the girls have gotten lazy and decided to roost on the fences,trees and sometimes they just lay down in the grass. With the colder weather coming the coyotes have needed to hunt. We have lost about half the hens. I really do not mind if a predator comes in and eats the chickens but when they come in and just kill them for fun it ticks me off tremendously.
We have spent about a week rounding up all the wayward hens and putting them back in their coop. We also enlisted some help of a few Great Pyrenees dogs to run night patrol. So far we have cut back on the losses. I will keep the hens in the coop for another few days (much to their dismay) to retrain them to go in at night. With the new lock-down the hens are not happy and not laying much so we go from 10 dozen a day to less than two... hopefully they will pick back up in a week or so.
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