What Actually Takes Chickens in Australia
The Growing Flock — Part 4 of 8
Your birds are around eleven weeks old now — out in the coop, roosting properly at night, and starting to look like real chickens rather than leggy teenagers.
They are also, for the first time, big enough to be worth something to everything else living on your block.
This is the part of keeping a flock nobody enjoys talking about. Let's be straightforward about it for a few minutes, then spend the rest of the article on what stops it happening.
Losses in Australian backyards come from a short list of animals, each leaves a recognisable signature, and nearly all of them are kept out by habits and hardware rather than luck.
Part One: Reading What Was Left Behind
If you have lost a bird, the scene tells you a great deal — and the evidence decides what you fix. Fixing the wrong thing is how keepers lose a second bird the following week.
Foxes
The red fox is the most common cause of serious losses across southern Australia, and the one most backyard coops are least prepared for.
Foxes come at dusk or just before dawn. A fox will often kill several birds in one visit and carry only one away, which surprises people expecting a predator to take what it can eat.
Look for digging at the base of the run, or a gap you would have sworn was too small. A fox passes through openings far narrower than its body looks capable of, and will lift loose mesh or push through a tired gate latch.
Domestic dogs
Dogs are a daytime problem, often a neighbour's dog rather than a wild animal — sometimes your own.
The signature is quite different from a fox. A dog kills many birds and leaves them where they fall, scattered and mauled rather than eaten. This is play behaviour, not hunting, which is why nothing is carried off.
Fence damage is usually obvious: pushed-in mesh, a bent panel, a scrabbled hole under a gate.
Raptors
Wedge-tailed eagles, goshawks and falcons hunt in daylight and take birds in the open.
The classic sign is a neat ring of plucked feathers on open ground, with little else. Raptors take one bird at a time and either eat it where it lands or carry it off.
If your run is uncovered and sits in a paddock or clear yard, this is the risk to think about. Birds with cover overhead — shrubs, a verandah, shade cloth — are rarely taken.
Quolls and feral cats
Both hunt at night, and both tend to take smaller birds — young stock and bantams are more at risk than a heavy breed.
Losses are usually one or two birds, with entry through a small gap: a vent, a space under an eave, a corner where mesh has pulled from timber.
Goannas and carpet pythons
These are warm-weather, daytime visitors, mostly after eggs and young birds rather than adults.
A python has an obvious tell: one that has eaten is still in the coop, visibly distended, because it can no longer fit back out through the gap it came in by. Leave it alone, keep children and dogs away, and call a licensed snake handler.
Goannas raid nest boxes repeatedly once they have found them, and are strong enough to bend light mesh.
Rats
Rats take eggs and very young chicks, and leave plenty of evidence: droppings along beams, chewed timber around door frames, tunnels under the coop floor.
They matter beyond the direct losses — they foul feed, spread disease, and a well-fed rat population draws in the animals higher up the chain.
A Note on Native Wildlife
Raptors, quolls, goannas and pythons are native species and are protected.
The keeper's job with these animals is exclusion, not control. Build so they cannot get in, and they move on to easier feeding elsewhere — they are not singling you out.
If a protected animal causes ongoing trouble you cannot design around, that is a matter for your state wildlife authority or a licensed handler, not something to take on yourself.
Part Two: The Fixes, In Order of Value
These are in order deliberately. The first costs nothing and prevents more losses than everything below it combined.
1. Shut the pop-hole at dusk, every single night
This is the highest-value habit in poultry keeping, and the one most losses trace back to.
A fox that can walk through an open pop-hole does not need to dig, chew or climb. All the mesh in the world does nothing if the door is open.
Your birds put themselves to bed reliably, and will be on the perch within twenty minutes of last light. The window between the last bird going in and a fox arriving is short, so close up promptly rather than "a bit later on".
2. Use an automatic door to make that habit reliable
The weakness of a habit is that it depends on you being home at dusk. Dinner runs late, you are held up in town, or you are away and someone else is feeding.
An automatic coop door removes the variable. Light-sensor and timer models close at dusk and open at dawn whether anyone is there or not, which covers exactly the gap where losses happen.
If you fit one, still check the birds a few nights running while you learn how it behaves in your conditions.
3. Get the mesh gauge right
Light hexagonal chicken wire keeps chickens in. It does not reliably keep a determined fox out — the wire is thin enough to be bitten and worked apart at a seam.
Where foxes are the problem, use welded aviary mesh in a heavier gauge with a smaller aperture, fixed to solid framing with batten screws rather than staples alone.
You need not redo the whole run at once. Start with the coop and the bottom half-metre of the run, where the pressure is applied.
4. Lay an apron against diggers
Foxes dig at the base of a fence line, right where they can smell birds.
Rather than trenching mesh deep into the ground, lay an apron — a strip about half a metre wide, laid flat pointing outward from the fence and pegged down. Grass grows through it within a season and it disappears.
It works because a digging animal starts at the base, hits wire underfoot, and does not think to back up and start again further out.
5. Cover the run
Raptors and pythons both arrive from above, so a covered run handles two problems at once.
Mesh, netting or shade cloth all help. Shade cloth adds summer relief, and any cover keeps wild birds out of the feed, which is worth doing for disease reasons alone.
If full cover is not practical, even partial shelter gives your birds somewhere to bolt to when a shadow passes over.
6. Remove spilled feed and secure the bins
Rats are drawn by feed, not by chickens. Everything else follows the rats.
- Store feed in sealed metal or heavy plastic bins with a firm lid, not the paper bag
- Rake up spillage around feeders rather than letting it build up
- Bring open feeders in at night, or use a treadle feeder that closes under its own weight
- Collect eggs daily so nothing sits in a nest box overnight
A Weekly Walk-Around
Five minutes once a week catches most problems before they become losses.
- Walk the full perimeter and look for fresh digging at the base of the fence
- Push on the mesh at knee height — anywhere it flexes badly is a weak point
- Check latches and hinges; a gate that has dropped leaves a gap you stop noticing
- Look for droppings and chewed timber inside the coop, especially in corners
- Confirm the pop-hole seats square and shuts fully, with no gap at the edges
None of this has to be perfect on day one. Start the pop-hole habit tonight and work down the list as time allows — you will have covered most of the risk long before you reach the bottom.
What's Next?
With the flock secure, the next thing to get right is what goes into them. Part 5, "Starter, Grower, Layer: Getting the Feed Transition Right", covers when to change feeds, why the timing matters for bone and shell development, and how to manage the switch smoothly.