I put a surveillance camera down at the henhouse. When I have checked it at night, I have seen rats running around eating the chickens’ grain. We stopped leaving a feeder in the henhouse, and instead just fed the birds in the morning to try to give them time to eat everything before it got raided by rats.
The Hand had done a pretty good job of making sure the fencing around the chicken run went six inches or more below grade. At the back of the barn, though, the walls just went down to dirt level and stopped. We had stored some old plywood and roofing material by leaning it against the back of the barn.
We noticed a sharp drop off in egg production. HA went down to feed the birds this morning and two mongooses fled the henhouse when she opened the door. Checking around the henhouse and the barn from which it is made, she moved the old roofing material and found where the rats and/or mongooses had dug under the barn wall. She found that space littered with egg shells (booooo!!!) and bits of plastic bags.
We trenched down beneath the edge of the wall and installed 10” of ¼” hardware cloth and stapled it to the barn wall. We cut it so that the bottom edge, 6” below grade, had wire spikes protruding.
Will it be enough to stop the mongooses? The rats? (I’ve found building something rat-proof is a major challenge.) We’ll just have to watch and see.
—2p