Fox Attack & New Chicken Run
This Video is from the Youtube channel: “Rob Bob’s Aquaponics & Backyard Farm”.ย
G'Day Folks. Our chicken "Chook Chook" was attacked by a Fox!
This video walks you through the events of that night & the steps we've taken to keep our small homestead flock safe.
Cheers all.
Rob, B & Jack. ๐พ๐พ
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Down the track it looks like it could be worth putting in some infra-red motion activated flood lights, just so that if anything does run around you can get a clearer picture on the security cameras but without having to light the place up like daylight on any false alarms.
Good idea. Will tell B about them. We were thinking about getting 3 or 4 game cameras with night capabilities but that sounds better.
Cheers mate.
Most modern better quality security camera’s do not use IR light anymore. Especially the ones that have POI. Powered by the data cable. They have such a good night vision, they can operate with normal color and if needed a small extra normal light during the night if there is no moonlight at all.
@@insAneTunA I’ve tried them (e.g. Starvis and the like, Hikvision, Dahua, etc.). They can only do that in the city/suburbs where there is a lot of ambient light. Out in the country where it’s truly dark they don’t give a very good image at all. They also tend to work by combining multiple frames together, so you might get a clear picture of the whole scene where there’s no movement, but as soon as there’s movement it appears as a funny looking streak which can often make it hard to spot – and usually seeing movement is the whole point of having the camera in the first place. You can see that happening in this video where the fox isn’t clearly visible as it moves.
All good cameras still have night mode where they are IR sensitive for this reason, so there is definitely a valid use case for IR floodlights, especially when you’re outside of the city. You can also use white floodlights to get a colour image but you need a lot more of them to get as clear an image as you get in IR mode with only a few IR floodlights.
As with any floodlights, the trick is to get the light to spread evenly over the area you’re interested in, so you avoid hotspots that overexpose the image and make other areas too dark to see. You may also need to manually set the exposure in the camera’s night mode options to avoid the image washing out for a second when the lights activate, depending on whether this annoys you or not.
Rob, we just installed this in north east USA as a black bear ripped the door off the chicken coop one night. So far the alarm has scared away things that would eat the chickens, bobcats, racoons but we’ve yet to see the bear again. Fingers crossed!
Also you need to use quarter inch chicken wire mesh Not only in the run but in the coop because weasels can get in the cage you have them currently in or whatever kind of weasel type animal you have around your area and weasels will kill all your chickens you can get quarter inch chicken wire mesh anywhere
You don’t need to dig to make your chicken pen resistant to foxes. I saw an Australian homesteader lay fencing flat to the ground bent upwards near the vertical part of the fence and wire tied together. Pegs kept his ground fence under mower height. I don’t recall what grid size he used, but I think it was 2 inch squares. Foxes and dogs go for the bottom of the vertical part. I think he went out about 18 to 24 inches.
Why would you have to LOAD gun?! A unloaded gun is useless for defenseโฆโฆor killing predators . Iโm sure itโs some Australia law ? If so well we know what rules are for๐ง๐
might not be legal in his country. But yeah, how much time did he loose running down and up then loading?
Yeah one of the Aussie rules gotta store firearms and ammunition separately
@@Kearnesy figured that, well the government here has lots of [ rules] that go against common sense, so I just ignore them ๐๐จ๐ฑ
Keep the gun loaded?
might not be legal in his country. But yeah, how much time did he loose running down and up then loading?
Oh my! What an adventure Chook Chook had! I’m glad all is well.
hahaha I loved the reconstruction video with the animation. ๐
So glad chook chook is doing okay.โค
When we built our version of Fort Chookington up north near Darwin, we actually put chook wire over their whole night pen floor (a bit bigger than what you currently have). Chicken wire staked into ground, covered with dirt and sand, walls were hard wire mesh similar to the walls of your off the ground hutch, that was then wrapped in a very tough bird mesh wire. The stuff not so easy to chew through. Roof was the same bird mesh. We then built them a little, low shed inside to roost in. Pretty sure we made it sturdy enough to survive a small cyclone. ๐
We ended up having to use bricks and left over tin off cuts from the shed around the base of the pen fence, as juvenile snakes (mostly king browns) could get through the mesh and wire. We still got a large goanna get in (before we meshed the entire floor) and a chicken hawk somehow got through… but they survived a neighbour’s dog attack unscathed (bunnies in another caged area did not ๐ข), they weren’t raided by the wild pigs, we stopped losing our ducks to the big pythons, and only time the juvenile chooks disappeared was when out in the less goanna proof day cage (the size of two tennis courts but untouched scrub/ bushland, so harder to keep contained). We just couldn’t save the silly mumma chooks during the monsoons when they decided to take their broods of babies out of the safety pen and into bigger yard, only to have them washed away from under them in the deluges. ๐ข
So, I totally get you wantjng to secure it as much as you can. The Australian tropics can be a very unsafe place for chooks! And no, folks, leaving the gun loaded isn’t wise. Even if it’s kept in a decent gun safe. Fumble it when in a hurry, bye bye toes at the very least. Gun unloaded in safe, cartridges on top. Grab and go, assess situation while loading. It’s not rocket science.๐
I had 4 dogs come into my yard about mid day and kill 12 pullets and 1 cockrell. The chicks had only been allowed to leave the cage a couple days before this happened. Our hens went into a different fenced part of the yard so they were safe, but these young’uns hadn’t learned to go there yet.
Enjoying very much and appreciate all the farm tips
You may just switch to a breed of hens that can fly, like the Egyptian Fayoumi. Or you just need to get two dozen hens & two or three rosters to keep the foxes back.
The new ladies look delicate while Miss chook chook is definitely a country gal๐
When we built our chook run in ‘fox country’ NSW we used heavier chain link wire(bought from the dump shop and used to be an old school fence) which we laid down on the ground in the grass and built our fence from the middle of that.
Foxes could not dig through it and were unlikely to tunnel under a four foot obstacle.
Worked a treat. We eventually had a donkey and a few geese for protection of our ducks and 6 Australorp chickens, the rooster of which killed about a dozen snakes over the years. The ducks also had an island on our bigger dam, surrounded by papyrus and other reeds. We got there every weekend by punt.
Instead of the chicken wire it is much better to get 1 inch mesh. I don’t know what it is called in Australia but it is 2.5 cm squares fencing much stronger and last longer.
Snake proof?
Go Jack the dog crusader. The night pen will be snake proof too so a bonus. Love the channel, take care =-)
Nice to hear that your voice hasn’t gone up a couple of octaves ๐ from the barbed wire fence… LOL
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If chook chook has already laid an egg she is already over the trauma. Have lost a lot of chickens to foxes over the years including 3 show birds that I owned for only a few weeks. The delights of farm life. Keeps you on your toes for sure.
Poor baby girl. Be careful as there are also dingoes within the area. They made a huge mess out of a friends dog in booyal. Poor puppy. Keep jack close.
Our laws on guns suck. If we could keep our guns ready, we could keep our animals safe.