Opinions on supervised free range?

[Robert Corti]

I am surrounded by woods teaming with all sorts of Owls, Hawks, Skunks, and Coyote. We let our hens free range most of the day and evening and have had no problems yet (a bit over a year), but I realize that could change anytime. I think our saving grace has been having our dog out with them a lot of the time. We have a Doberman that is in and out all day long marking her territory. We had a coyote come in the yard one time the dog chased it off and much to my amazement it never returned... Again, it seems I have been quite lucky but it works for me.

 

[livestockprojectswithkids]

Ok, so here's my situation-

Right now I have two 2-1/2 week pullets and two 1/2 week old pullets. They're housed separately right now, and we're planning to introduce them to each other pretty soon, and hopefully have them all outside in the coop by very late April/early May. While we still have a good ways to go before they're out, my family is starting to bring up a large decision... run or free range?

Well, ok, "free range". Our town ordinance forbids "true" free-range hens, so really i'm just talking about the highly supervised type- assuming our neighbors let us get away with it .

While we're leaning towards supervised free ranging our hens rather than using a run, there's still a large concern for us with the predators in our area. We have...

• Hawks- biggest concern. There's so many of them around us... too many.
• Possums- they pop into our yard maybe once every 3 months or so, but it's usually at night and they run at even the smallest movement from inside our house.
• Owls and other larger birds- I haven't seen them around here, but they definitely exist in my area.
• Raccoons- Again, haven't seen one, but they're bound to exist- or start existing once we get the chicks outside.
• Coyotes, foxes, etc.- We live about a block away from an entrance to a scenic trail, and while these animals don't usually stray too far from it I'm very open to the worst case scenario

Our plan would be to have the hens outside the coop as much as possible, probably for an hour+ before sundown. Would that be a safe option for us? Are the hawks usually scared of humans, or does that not matter if when it's hungry? How close do we need to be to them? Is this just a bad idea in general?

Thanks.

(also, is there a recommended age to start supervised free ranging?? So many questions...)

We do some free ranging but we have a great pyrenees who helps us with protecting. We did run into a problem with our chickens getting out into the pasture where the dog was not and we lost 2 to foxes. Since it seems like every year we are getting new chicks for my daughter's 4-H project we use a chicken tractor to solve the problem of older and younger chickens. Plus she has to keep them seperate when she brings them back from fair to be sure that we dont infect the flock with something from fair.
We have a board they can roost on and one small nesting box inside.