Is this chicken egg pecking damage or rats?

[aart]

Sorry if I'm being stupid or misunderstanding - I appreciate any ideas or solutions for my situation. Thank you!

It can be hard to explain...and hard to apply to each specific situation.
It's knee jerk reaction to say 'add HC', when it might not fit every scenario.
It sounds like you may have a significant population of rats which have already evaded the wire you did put down....so you'll likely need a multi pronged approach, poison being a part of it-which you'll already started using.

If you post some pics of your coop, run, and where the rat tunnels are,
more thoughtful suggestions of how to employ HC(often call 'rat wire') might be forthcoming.

 

[Folly's place]

Sooner or later your rats will be also killing your chickens! You do need to eliminate this colony ASAP, and that will include having a truly safe night time coop for your birds.
Poison bait in bait stations is the only way, unfortunately, to eliminate all of them.
Mary

 

[Birdinhand]

I'm interested (and a bit confused) about the hardware cloth idea and how to apply it in my situation... my wooden hen house is within an area that is surrounded by chicken wire, 6 feet high and dug into the ground to keep out the foxes and badgers. I leave the bottom door (1 ft off the ground with a ramp leading up to it) open at all times so the hens can come and go as they like when they want to go in to roost or lay or come out in the morning before I get up to feed them breakfast. The rats have dug a network of tunnels underneath the entire enclosure that come up inside it so they can steal the chicken food and water during the day and recently they have also started to go up the ramp into the wooden house and steal eggs (and potentially harass my girls!).
I can't work out how I would apply the hardware cloth in a way that would keep the rats out but allow the hens to step over it into their house?! I imagine you mean that the hardware cloth needs to be quite high to keep them out but how would I i. allow the hens access to the house to lay and ii. if I set up a perimeter of it far enough away and around the house so the hens could still access their food and water (which is in the enlosure - not the house - how can I stop the rats from just digging more holes and coming back up inside that enclosure?!
Sorry if I'm being stupid or misunderstanding - I appreciate any ideas or solutions for my situation. Thank you!

poison is a short term solution and if I were absolutely overrun with rats, I can't say I wouldn't resort to using it as a "nuclear option" initially, but either way, a long term solution needs to be applied or you will be battling their endless replacements going forward. Back on the farm in PA that I grew up on, rats were the end of our chickening joys, several times, with the coop getting riddled with holes and the earth underneath it turned to swiss cheese. When my kids got to an age where chicken keeping would be an enrichment, I went back to the drawing board and studied this issue and 5 years into it, I'd say my solution worked.
There are two main approaches that I think can work. For small urban homestead coops where enveloping with HWC, wall to wall, ceiling and floor with mended seams and no gaps more than 1/2", is a practical approach, a few hundred extra dollars spent up front result in many years of hassle free/rat free/poison free chickening. We have bald eagles and hawks and owls in our neighborhood, so poisoning rats is poisoning everything that eats rats. death by poison is inefficient, only about 40% effective and leads to a slow and inhumane death... something I'm not entirely above if necessary but something I generally like to avoid.

one approach for large runs where enveloping the entire structure in HardWare Cloth is impractical, is using electric fencing on the outer perimeter where the chickens "free range" during the day, using poultry netting in the smaller "inner" run and using hardware cloth on the "inner coop" that has a door and is closed up at night. (rats are nocturnal mostly, and quite risk averse, until their population explodes, and they get lazy and over confident, then you might see them in the day too. if you are seeing them during the day, you have a severe issue.) The inner coop should be large enough that the birds won't suffer too much on the days you forget to let them out, it is the only place where the food, water, laying boxes and perching area goes ... and a door! Ideally the hardware cloth is added just after framing, wall to wall, ceiling and floor (then covered with about 8" of dirt for the deep litter method). for the part that goes under the dirt, you can use thick, black zip ties, they will hold up better over time than the metal clips used for making rabbit cages and such. The more of an eve you have to keep water away from the ground where the hardware cloth is, the longer is will last. even the door is covered with hardware cloth and the door is hung so that there is not more than an 1/2" gap around the edges.
if you are retrofitting an already made coop, it's more difficult, because hardware cloth is harsh to work with in tight spaces. I use tin snips to cut mine, galvanized "U" nails to secure it to wood, and black zip ties to mend it where there is not wood to nail to. a good 2.5" minimum overlap is important. you need to remove all inner structures and roll it out, nail it down to the wood framing and zip tie it where it will go under ground, being absolutely meticulous in leaving no gaps. once you have enveloped the whole thing, then put back in all the structures like the roost, egg laying boxes, water and food dispensers etc. for the door, make it tough, coon tough, I recommend two farm duty latches, one at each corner, of different sorts, to outsmart the coons.
if you are dead set against having to close up the coop at night and open the door in the morning, then you can add an automatic door, but really, dealing with rats requires vigilance and persistence and is the number one investment needed for success, IMHO. If you can keep the rats out, you keep everything else out by default!

 

[madgeroonie]

Wow thanks everyone for your comprehensive replies. I will let the ideas soak in.... and in the meantime keep putting down poison and start closing the door at night!