Need help improving our predator defenses!

[Stephine]

The tower is for our internet. It had to be 125' tall to get over the trees between us and their tower. The cables are about 1/4" thick. There is one at 30, 60, and 90 feet that come down and meet at the ground where they are cemented into the ground. There is this same thing on three sides.

That's my hubby up there working on it.

Wow! That’s amazing! Our internet is abysmal where we are- I am envious!
I am astonished that that set up would deter hawks, but of course it’s not necessary to make it impossible for them to hunt there, just less attractive than their alternatives…

 

[Marieaa70]

We are 4 months into our effort to raise chickens. So far it’s been working pretty well, until today. We have a nice sized coop that sits at the far end of a fenced in area that is about 4000 sq ft in total (the area, not the coop). We put up a wooden privacy fence in December for them to have plenty of space, but we’ve haven’t been able to set up adequate protection for them, and we probably made a huge mistake putting them out there before we had more protection in place. They had gotten so big, we had no more room to keep them inside. We clearly don’t have adequate protection from predators because, unfortunately a hawk was able kill one of our chickens today. So we clearly need to do more. Although my wife grew up with chickens, it was in childhood in a very different climate with different predators. And she’s a bit stumped. I’ve never raised chickens, so I’m totally in the dark. We spent a lot of money on this privacy fence to give them a lot of room, but we’re realizing we haven’t done enough to protect them, and we need ideas on the best way to go, and a way that works with our limited budget. What I really want to do is have someone who has knowledge of this kind of thing come and look at our current setup (or maybe offer ideas on seeing pictures of it), but we really need someone knowledgeable to tell us the best way to keep our chickens safer without breaking the bank. And we kinda need to come up with something fairly soon. We’re afraid to let them out of their coop right now until we have something definitive in place. We’ve already seen the hawk return and land on our fence presumably to look for another target. It already knows it’s a place it can find more, so we need to put in place something to keep it, and anyone else who wants to take a shot at our chickens, out!

Run some fish line back and forth with the fence if you can and hang some ribbons on it to scare off the hawk , That hawk will not move on now that it s got chicken to eat, or put up a scare crow, stuff that moves a lot,

 

[Califas77]

I have a friend who's husband got into a tug-of-war with a hawk with a hen in it's clutches!! We have a smaller run wrapped around with the hen house in one corner so they can get behind it for coolness in the hot summers, and a lot of places covered where they can hide. The run is about 3 x as big as the house and I think smaller than a hawk can safely land and get out again. Then we have a bigger area we let them into that has full grown bushes, grape vines, lilacs, flowering quince, Rosemary hedge, Fruiting Quince.... they have lots of places to hide in both the run and the larger area.