The chicken coop is pretty solidly built to keep out mongooses. We have ¼” hardware cloth mesh buried 6” or more deep around the entire structure and stapled to the wood. The corner posts, though, are set on concrete piers and it isn’t possible to staple the mesh to the piers, or even get it deeply buried around them. The last time we had a mongoose raid I placed more mesh at the critical corners and the problem went away for a while. Recently, though, the egg counts are way down and I often see a mongoose scurrying away when I approach the barn. I tried spraying some expanding structural foam around the piers, but now I’ve noticed bits of the foam scattered around and eggs are again being broken or stolen at an alarming rate. Above, a security camera I have in the barn caught the rascal, though it didn’t shed any light on its path of ingress.
More engineering work is needed.
—2p