Yep. We have lots of feral chickens wandering around in Hilo. At least one used to brood in our music studio until we plugged the structure up enough to keep the chickens out. We had eggs now and then - I was amused at the differing responses I’d get from students when I came across an egg and offered it up - they ranged from “sure, thanks!” to a horrified, “hell no, you have no idea what the mother hen was eating!”
There are lots of feral cats around in the same area. This leads to scenes of adorable mother hens with 12 chicks trailing behind … 10 chicks the next day … maybe 6 the day after that. But some obviously survive.
Chickens aren’t much trouble compared to other livestock. I spend about 5 minutes a day taking care of mine. Except for roosters they are not particularly noisy although they are ‘talky’, they do not smell if you clean up after them like you would any other animal, and they cost little.
In my many decades of chicken keeping I’ve known many people who’ve taken up chickens and renounced it within a year. The #1 reason is coming out to the coop to witness a scene of horrific carnage. Raccoons, dogs, coyotes, weasels, redtail hawks, eagles, owls, minks, fishers, bears … chickens trapped in a permeable coop are just dinner waiting for diners. And novices tend to think about keeping chickens IN, not the essential part, keeping predators OUT.
My coop and run are fortresses. A bear could get in, with considerable effort, but that’s it. And that’s why I still raise chickens 40 years later.
The #2 reason is the neighbors complaining about the roosters. Who contrary to movie soundtracks and cornflakes ads, not only crow at dawn but also at 3 a.m. onwards, and all day long. Very loud.
Not really true. The Eurasian goshawk, for instance, weighs around 1kg (males are smaller than that) and routinely kills and eats pheasant and black grouse (males around 1.2kg, females around 1kg), sometimes even capercaillie (around 2 to 4kg). Logically, the chicken keepers here have losses due to goshawk activity.
My family had chicken houses. We provided eggs to a hatchery. The chickens were returned when they got old and stopped laying. We always loaded them up at night because they wouldn’t run. 5,000 took quite awhile to pick up and put in cages for transport. Everyone in the family pitched in to help.
We did the same thing receiving the pullets. They were placed in our chicken houses at night. They usually started laying five or six weeks later.
I agree that it’s a mystery how they survive free range.
Having read the posts in this thread, I feel FrenchDunadan has offered the most plausible explanation. Chickens tend to stay near human residences and wild predators tend to avoid human residences.
Tell that to my wanna be farmer neighbor, who has lost 15 chickens and 12 turkeys to racoons. (Mainly because he’s a fucking idiot, and does not understand what is going on)
Their wild ancestors are feral murderbirds and the domestic ones aren’t far off. They’re more capable than we give them credit for, and also their main predators in captivity tend to be nocturnal or crepuscular rather than diurnal. Raccoons and other predators can devastate a cage.
Hawaiian islands are all different. Kauai has tons of chickens who basically fill the niche of squirrels in other places, you see them everywhere. Aside from a few isolated instances, that island doesn’t have a big mongoose population like other islands where the chickens get murdered.
All I can say, is that, somewhere, somehow, there exists a god of chickens.*
My mother, in all the years I lived at home, always kept a flock of 12 (now us kids have moved on, she keeps just 6). Always hens, layers. When they went off the lay, the poor geriatric birds were destined for the soup pot.
We never had a bird go missing due to predators - and while the potential predator list Is reasonably way different to those in the US, those chickens had owls, eagles, dogs and basic stupidity as their major predators.
I’ve seen a Rooster chase a 220lb guy in shorts out of a backyard. They can jump and catch you on the calves of you legs. Their spurs hurt. But it’s unlikely a Rooster could fight off a predator.
Our pullets came from our supplier with the beaks blunted and spurs clipped. That was for our safety. Hatching eggs require chickens in open pens with a Rooster.
We went into the pens 4 times a day to collect eggs from the nest boxes. Its very labor intensive to collect, scrape off, and grade eggs.
Well, I said “generally”…
As a German study on goshawk, it found that chickens made 100 kills… on a total of 8 400 birds kills. Pigeons made 2 000 of this kills.
So it’s not that raptors are not able to kill a hen, but rather that they don’t kill hens cause they’re not in the wild.
Well, Germany is just loaded with people and infrastructure, and goshawks are really woodland birds. Up here in the north, where settlements are surrounded by woods that extend through “green corridors” right into asphalt, goshawks are definitely seen in the domestic chicken environment, and they do take 'em from the yards etc.
I’ve personally witnessed goshawk kills on male pheasants, black grouse and mallards, all of which are larger than goshawks themselves, and capable fighters. I’ve never kept chickens or even been to a chicken-keeping yard, but were I to take it up, I would be foolish to think goshawks won’t come to my yard for dinner.
You need a rooster and a hen to make more chickens instead of unfertilized eggs. Roosters are louder than hens. You could be in a place where the chickens are not too loud but the roosters are.
The stories I’ve heard of chicken flocks being destroyed in one night by some predator could fill a large book. Usually at night, but definitely not always. Many in suburban areas right next to human housing.
Foxes take my free range hens in broad daylight, but typically one at a time. So will bobcats and coyotes. It is the penned hens that all get killed at once. Dogs kill whole flocks in the daytime. I have lost hens to all of the above. In daylight.
Roosters will attack predators but often lose their lives to them while the hens escape. Happened to me twice.
The reason people buy chicks instead of just letting hens set on and hatch them out is that even if you have a broody hen who is also a good mother (the instinct to set is selected out of most laying breeds as they don’t lay while setting) is that you will get statistically half roosters out of the clutch. You don’t need but one rooster, if that. The others are just for making noise and getting in fights, attacking your legs, and beating up your hens.
The answer to how free range chickens survive is, not for long, generally. If there are few predators, lots of shelter, food, and lots of people and dogs are leashed or few, then longer, long enough to reproduce. But this environment doesn’t occur very often, otherwise the world would be overrun with chickens, and it isn’t.
Where I live, if my hens weren’t locked up tight at night, they’d last a week or two at best. Once the predators knew where easy dinner was it would be curtains. And they are always watching.
When you buy ‘free range’ eggs, you are not buying eggs laid by semi-feral hens. There are legal parameters for the label, but essentially it just means the hens get to walk around outside (in a confined space), instead of living out their very short lives in a tiny cage surrounded by a thousand other such cages. Those are called batteries. All the commercial eggs not otherwise labeled are battery eggs.
Some farms produced ‘pastured’ eggs. Particularly certified organic farms. These hens are actually on pasture, and commonly lay and roost in large coops on wheels moved by a tractor when the pasture gets eaten down. They are fenced in portable electrified netting. I’ve done this on a small scale myself. There’s an organic farm near me which runs maybe 300 hens this way, enough to supply their CSA clients with eggs.
At the farm where I boarded horses for several years, they had a smallish coop and caging setup they’d made for about half a dozen hens. They kept it out on a pasture except in winter and moved it around every week or so; also fed them with chicken feed. They also had a nonmobile, larger henhouse and coop for winter. I don’t recall them losing any hens to predators.