Suburban Garden Predators

The name suburb conjures up images of manicured lawns and rows of closely huddled houses.  What does not come to mind are predatory animals (not counting humans here).  One may think that urban sprawl drives away all the wildlife.  However, many smaller predatory animals have figured out ways to call the suburbs home too.  In fact, we humans make it easy for them!  People leave out garbage, food for pets, and feed wild birds.  This makes our backyards and golf courses host two different worlds of daytime human activities and the nighttime wildlife activities.  Considering the difference between the ideal of suburbia and the reality, many people think about the risks from unleashed dogs, cats, and people.  While those are real threats, few people consider the wildlife. In our area we  have raptors (hawks, owls, and eagles), snakes, raccoon, possums, and fox  all living in the suburbs. We also have deer but I am not sure they are fond of eating chicken.  

We have seen all of these predatory animals in our neighborhood. And all of these would consider eggs and maybe a chicken delicious.  Sometimes I see the actual animal.  This is the case with a red shoulder hawk, a coopers hawk, and an owl.  Other times I see the evidence of the animal visiting.  This is the with the picture below.  The first thing we saw one morning was the obvious tracks of a snake under the hen house. 

From the tracks it looks like this snake was too big to get into the run.  We have ¾ inch hardware cloth around the bottom.  And it is very likely that a snake was really looking for eggs.  The snake went away with no easy food since we have the house high enough off the ground.  So far we have been really lucky and predators have not been able to get any of our chickens or eggs.  This really due to using a well built coop that keeps the dangers or the world outside and my pampered poultry safe inside.