My hens have a love/hate relationship with mice. Several years ago, I noticed little black “rice grains” mixed in with their feed.
For about five seconds, I thought it was neat. Then I realized that it wasn’t exotic black grains that my chickens were ingesting, but rather plain old mouse poop. (Ew!) Come to think of it, I had noticed several mice in the coop.
And so began my internet search for how to get rid of mice in a chicken coop.
The first suggestion was to remove food from the coop each night and store it in sealed containers. Okay, seriously…who has the kind of time to move their chicken feed twice a day? I’d rather have mice!
Another suggestion was that mice do not like the smell of mint. So I planted spearmint all around my coop. And then, for good measure, I swabbed the interior with essential peppermint oil. But alas, the minty freshness did nothing to deter the mice. In fact, I suspect they rather enjoyed it.
Lastly, I read about sealing off the cracks in a coop that a mouse could squeeze into. Really? Did the person who wrote that know that an adolescent mouse can squeeze in a hole that’s the size of a pen?
I ceded defeat to the mice and just figured my chickens would have to pick through the poop to get to their food.
But in an unexpected turn of events, the following year, the mice suddenly disappeared from the coop. What was responsible for this miraculous development? I had gotten a new flock of chicks, and with the new start, I decided to finally get a waterproof, waste-proof feeder so I could put it in my run. (Okay, I decided to make a waterproof, waste-proof feeder because I was still too cheap to buy one.) I was hoping to save space and save money. And just as soon as I got the food out of the coop, the mice disappeared as well. It was really that simple.
You might wonder if the mice would just eat the food out of my waterproof waste-proof feeder, especially since I was now leaving it in the run. But no—unbeknownst to me when I made it—that feeder was mouse-proof! (See my mouse test video.) However, we still had our share of furry visitors to the run. After all, I do throw kitchen scraps and wheat grass fodder to my chickens daily. That would be enough to interest any rodent.
One day, I heard a loud squawking and caught the middle of a “Gimme-that!” chicken game. You know, the one where one chicken has something every other chicken wants. The coveted item dangled precariously from the running chicken’s beak…and seemed to have a tail.
Yes, it was a mouse. A little bloody and definitely dead, the mouse was pulled from limb to limb, and then went down the hatch with a mighty gulp. See the chicken/mouse chase video.
And that was just the first of three (THREE!) times I’ve caught my hens catching, killing, and eating mice! Instead of my chickens having a mouse problem, now my mice have a chicken problem! These days when I look in the run, I don’t see big fat hens, I see terrifying, prehistoric, feathered velociraptors!
