Gardening blogGardensHow to foil a fox attack on your chickens
Foxes love a chicken dinner, but how do you keep them at bay? Andy Cawthray shares his tips on making sure your flock is safe from predatorsI live in a rural area, so it comes as no surprise that the countryside around me has its fair share of foxes; there's plenty of food for them after all and no real predator risk save falling prey to the odd Michelin tyre.
I like to provide my breeding flocks with large enclosures and allow the birds not being used for breeding and those who have retired from the breeding pens, to be totally free range, but this can present a bit of a smorgasbord to passing foxes. Add to that the railway line, which is less than a mile from the chicken pens and frequently used as a fox motorway, then I'm most certainly a potential drive-through snack bar.
So I've had the odd run-in with the local population of Vulpes vulpes, and in my earlier years of keeping chickens here they presented the sort of challenge I wasn't sure I could win. It's a challenge faced by most mainland UK poultry keepers.
To lose one bird to a fox is distressing. To lose your entire flock to a fox attack can be soul destroying, it can lead to some people giving up poultry keeping rather than continue to struggle with persistent predation and the associated trauma.
Whether your birds are pets or a functional part of your food supply, to find them slaughtered en masse from a fox attack is not a something you'd wish on anyone who keeps birds. More often than not you will find carcasses strewn across around the place, and in other cases you'll simply find a load of feathers. Either way it can produce a human reaction ranging from remorse to outright rage. In fact it's quite possibly one of the most likely events to trigger an anthropomorphic reaction toward the fox in even the most rational of people.
So how do you mitigate the risk of a fox attack, particularly if you want your flock to have a greater level of freedom? I've tried a number of techniques: electric fences, roofed-in runs, dug-in wire, radios... I even fitted movement-sensitive light and sound system once, but it resulted in the equivalent of a Jean Michel Jarre concert taking place outside the bedroom window in the small hours of the morning. I gave that idea up.
And so I reached the conclusion that there are five basic points that can help reduce the risk of loss and these are:
1. Don't let your flock out into an unsecured area too early in the morning. If there is insufficient noise and disturbance (non-chicken related) in the area then it's quite possible a fox may be lying in wait
2. Keep your boundaries well secured. Foxes will look to exploit any weakness, be that a short circuit in an electric fence or by expanding a hole dug by a rabbit. It may take weeks for the fox to find one, but you can be sure if your chickens are on the usual route the fox takes, it will check.
3. Walk around your flock at irregular times. A pattern to your movements is no different to a weakness in your fence.
4. When the birds go to roost, be there to close the door - in fact be there 15 minutes before.
5. Be aware that foxes can and do feed during the day.
These are just my basic rules; there will no doubt be plenty of other techniques that other people deploy successfully for their own circumstances. Mine work well as a starter for ten, but are not failsafe. Just the other Saturday I went indoors around midday to see what was happening at Wimbledon, heard a panic call from a bird, rushed out and found a dog fox ragging an Indian Runner duck by the neck. I set off in pursuit shouting obscenities, and the fox fled. Looking around I found all bar two of my flock of Ixworths dead along with some of my Owlbeards.
Fault? There was a gap under the fence that I'd missed in my morning checks despite my wanting to blame the draw of that evil Wimbledon on TV which let Mr Fox know how and when to have its fun with my flock.
- For more information on how to manage foxes, these information pamphlets from Natural England provide some useful guidance.
This post is part of a regular series on poultry keeping from Andy Cawthray, a self confessed chickeneer who writes for a number of magazines, provides talks & courses on keeping poultry at home and shares his experiences on his personal blog TheChickenStreet.
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