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sarkymite

Not sure how to put this...

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... this is a bit grim. 

My partner has just found a deceased chicken in our fenced chickens area. But it is not one of ours. It has clearly been taken by a fox or other similar sized predator.

I was unaware that anyone else in the immediate area was keeping hens, but I am acutely aware that whoever they are, they are likely to be presently very upset and wondering about the fate of at least one bird. I wish I could find out who it is (not that that would do any good).

Our WIR door is broken, a hinge snapped a week ago (it's only just over 2 years old - is that normal?!) So we are now battening down all the hatches, extra cable ties everywhere and the girls' free roam time is being seriously curtailed ☹️

 

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Sorry to hear about the dead chicken.  Foxes visit day and night unfortunately.   Usually they kill everything and don’t always bother to take any so if your hens were out at the time you were lucky.   We lost 9 once and he/she took none.  Do you have a local FB group for your town. Maybe put an update in there asking whoever is missing a chicken in your area to private message you 

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Hi ajm200. Ours were almost certainly locked up safely when this one was left in our yard. It seems to have been left overnight.

Mr Fox is a very regular visitor to our garden- you can practically set your watch by him, so we are pretty vigilant anyway, but I think it was just quite shocking finding someone else's poor bird like that. 

I have no idea if we have local area FB pages etc... guess I will be doing some detective work this evening!

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23 minutes ago, sarkymite said:

Hi ajm200. Ours were almost certainly locked up safely when this one was left in our yard. It seems to have been left overnight.

Mr Fox is a very regular visitor to our garden- you can practically set your watch by him, so we are pretty vigilant anyway, but I think it was just quite shocking finding someone else's poor bird like that. 

I have no idea if we have local area FB pages etc... guess I will be doing some detective work this evening!

It must have been horrible for you.  

My son was just 5 when he found our 9. He used to go out after breakfast to get the eggs and the coop was at the end of the garden out of sight of the house so I didn’t realise.  

 

We we used to have a very tame fox visiting but he stopped a while ago.  Probably a victim of the very busy road between us and the forest 😔

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Sorry to hear it, how bizarre!

I wonder if she got lost and found your coop before a predator found her? Very strange if a predator carrier her into the run.

I'd give Omlet a ring about the hinge - definitely wouldn't expect it to break after 2 years.

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Lewis, I had also wondered if she had got lost and was perhaps roosting in or under the small tree that is in there. We don't routinely check the run enclosure itself as it is large fenced area - we just count our birds into the WIR/coop. So if she had for example been hiding in the undergrowth, we wouldn't have known.

I had a look when I got home (it was my partner who found her) - She was a very pretty pure breed of some sort, not a heavy bird, and her wings were not clipped. Its not impossible that she could have made her own way in from elsewhere and then been caught by our nightly visitor. I feel terrible for her owner, whoever they are 😔

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