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ArjinFerman  Tinfoil Gigachad  3d ago (text post)   468 thread views

Tinker Tuesday for February 25, 2025

This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.

Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.

If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service

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Not entirely necessary unless the wife or kids get unreasonably attached to them. Just some shiny strands overhead and a tolerance for losses is all you need. I only ever had one taken by a hawk, out of a few dozen lost to coons, cars, and Mysteriously Stone Dead Syndrome.

Damn thing must have been desperate to make the run, because it nailed her on the back of the neck and realized it couldn't carry her up out of the clearing. Dropped her after a few ft.

They're a very good animal for introducing kids to the mysteries of life and death, and answering where we go when we die (the compost pile)

Your hawks must be chill, then. I know of a prepper from Kiev who stopped having chickens because he had no recourse against hawks and wouldn't pay for feed, trying to be a 100% self-sufficient prepper and all that.

It's all about cover. Chickens are a brush bird, not open range creatures. They like bushes, rotting logs, low tree branches to perch on, and a protective canopy overhead.

I live alongside a ridge with a road on it, where hawks hover all afternoon on the thermals. They only dive on field rats and such out in the open. They're very nervous about going anywhere near brush, because being caught on the ground is a death sentence for them.
It's pretty common to see eagles circling above a dead deer in a bush, never having the balls to go for it until the vultures show up and take their lunch.

If someone has a bunch of open pasture... Get sheep, not chickens. They're the real ultimate prepper animal.

I assume I’m missing something obvious, but can’t you just keep the chickens in a coop/cage to stop the hawk getting in?

You have two options: keep them in a coup and feed them or let them eat whatever they find in your backyard but leave them unprotected.

It's "free eggs" only if you don't have to buy chicken feed.

I suppose it wouldn't be impossible to put a cage or net over the entirety of your backyard, would it? Aesthetics would suffer, of course.

The visible stringers with foil on I talked about earlier are the easy way to do this. It'll cover any big gaps in your canopy cover: if there's an easy route in and out hawks will go for it. But they generally won't dive into something that looks suspicious.

I believe the "standard" practice in this situation is to use a movable chicken coup called a chicken tractor. You move the tractor from spot to spot in the yard as the chickens exhaust the forage the tractor is over. Feed would still likely be needed, though less. This is what @orthoxerox was referencing with the need for a movable enclosure.

The eggs may not count as "free range" if the chickens are raised this way, but it's arguably more humane than exposing them to predation. Chickens are a type of roosting fowl and tend to exhibit less stress if they have a place to safely roost at all times. As @SteveAgain mentioned modern chickens were bred from birds that can fly into tree tops to roost, it seems this instinct isn't completely gone with modern breeds, they just can't make it to tree tops.

I've always thought chicken tractors are a pretty bad kludge for having chickens on open pasture with no tree cover (and not much decent forage for them). They prefer woodland with lots of insects in rotting logs, which also protects them from hawks that rarely dive in without a clear exit strategy.

Chicken-scratching is how they find insects under a layer of fallen leaves and sticks. It's not a motion made for lawns.

You don’t do the chicken cannibalism thing?

Redpill me on the shiny strands overhead- I’d definitely be more worried about feral cats, but reasonable precautions.

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