Last night a really weird thing happened. We’re not sure what caused it — if anyone has any ideas, please let us know …
I woke up around 1 am to loud bird sounds outside in the rain. At first I thought it might be geese returning to our fields to munch away, so I opened a window to hear better — it was our rooster, Mr. Mister, sounding an alarm!
(For those of you who don’t know, nightfall has a hypnotic sleep effect on chickens, so they only cry aloud when being disturbed. Even when we move their house at night, they don’t make much noise.)
So, we threw jackets on over bathrobes and ran into the dark rain with a flashlight, prepared to find a skunk or other pest in the hen house. Instead, we found Mr. Mister caught outside in the electric net fencing that circles the coop. He was crying because he was being shocked!
Casey turned off the charger and Mr. Mister calmed down and returned to hypnotic sleep state, even though he was still caught in the fence. Casey donned some oven mitts and carefully pulled him out of the netting. Bizarrely, he was caught in one of the upper holes, which meant he must have flown up and into the fence with a lot of force and drive.
He seems to be ok now. He was very wet last night when Casey put him away — it was hard to tell how long he’s been out and trapped.
There were NO signs of predators or other disruptions — no skunk smell, no feathers, no disturbed chickens — just Mr. Mister stuck in the fence in the middle of the dark cold wet night. And the electric fence obviously works, because he was NOT happy to be there.
So … what happened? Chickens do not leave their houses at night without reason. Was there a predator that we missed? An owl? (Even that doesn’t make sense because Mr. Mister isn’t always the best protector — when we have had skunks in the hen house he hardly noticed.) Or, is our rooster just going crazy? Thoughts?
We’ll probably close the chicken coop door for a few nights, just in case. But it’s still a bizarre situation.
Did you count your eggs the next morning? Short any?? Sometimes a “ferret”, or “mink” or other very slim animal will sneak into the hen house, right thru the holes in “chicken netting”, and will reach under sleeping chickens to roll the eggs out. You may find the evidence in broken eggshells on the floor of the henhouse, eggs that have been rolled out of the nest and left, or eggshells out in the chicken yard where they have been eaten. Sometimes even small chickens will be dragged away. Now, if that rooster is a small one, he may have been “dragged” outside and the attempt made to drag him through the fence. Solution: try traps for the little varmint. As a boy I used to lay up on the roof of a nearby shed with a shotgun all night. I never got any varmints from there, because they could smell me, but I tried. Richard
When we had those problems, it was usually a predator taking the “meal” with them. Probably just a newbie predator. Owls and bobcats were our worst offenders. The owls would even break the plastic deer netting on our hoophouses to get at the chickens. Oh and the Nite Guard lites did not work as well here as a shotgun. Oops, I let the cat out of the bag.
Winter is the worst, because the predators are hungry too, and willing to take more risks. If you can shut them in at night that would be the best.
Poor Mr. Mister, what a nightmare that must have been. Kidnapping and torture, and then the dreaded Ove Glove! :)
I love a good mystery! But the poor rooster… what a rough night. But it could have been worse, as my favorite rooster Prince could have told us, had he made it through the fateful night that he disappeared. (sniff)
But I digress. I’m betting an owl, or possibly even a coyote. They can learn to jump the fence, as we learned during our last year of raising chickens. I agree with Nita about winter being rough… everybody out there is hungry. Did you find any feathers, or any sign of a struggle?
You could have a ferret or mink taking eggs (that was a problem for the former occupants at our old farm) but I wonder if it would have spooked the rooster enough to send him into the fence?
Good luck solving this…
Ignorant question perhaps, but do we have ferrets and minks in the Willamette Valley?