I’ve lost a couple more birds to the hawk so I have to do something. I’ve decided to move the birds to what will be their winter location. This is relatively close to the house so I can run power to keep their water from turning to ice and will be easier to check on them. Plus this area has a lot of honeysuckle bushes, which I hope will provide enough cover from the hawk. This is a bold bird, it appears he has went into the coop twice to get a bird.
I build the coop as a skidable structure and it sits on two 4×4’s with a 45deg angle cut at each end. There is a rope at each end that I can use to pull by hand (just barely by myself on level ground) or using a tractor. This year we got an electric garden tractor build by GE in the early 70’s and it is working out great for this kind of thing. With winter coming on I want to enclose about 80% of the walls of the coop to cut down on the wind. I have went through 2 winters so far with this 3 sided coop concept and it has worked well so far. Last year this coop was covered with plastic, but I want something more permanent as I think this is working out for me. I got a 10 bay nest box from Craig’s List that I want to mount in the coop as well.
Here is a quick video of my driving the electric tractor and pulling the coop behind.