Keeping hawks off your chickens: cover the run, because nothing else is published

First, confirm it was a hawk

Worth thirty seconds, because the fix is completely different for a ground predator and building a roof over the run solves nothing if a raccoon is working the walls. University of Maryland Extension publishes a diagnostic list, and the overlap is the trap:

Two things narrow it fast. Time of day: the same publication notes hawks hunt during the day and owls at night, so a daylight loss from an open run is the hawk case and an overnight loss from inside a closed coop is not. Location: a raptor takes a bird in the open; a raccoon works at a barrier. The predator-proofing page covers the ground side properly — hardware cloth, the apron, and the openings people forget.

What the law actually allows, briefly

Hawks, owls and eagles are federally protected in the United States under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. You cannot shoot, trap or relocate one, and University of Maryland Extension’s advice when a predator problem is serious is to “Ask for assistance from local authorities responsible for wildlife for suggestions” rather than to handle it yourself.

That is not a side note, it is the reason this page is about netting. Exclusion is not merely the best option for aerial predators; for most keepers it is the only lawful one. The predator-proofing page carries the full legal position with the federal sources.

Why the shiny things are not on this page

Reflective tape, scare-eye balloons, plastic owls, old CDs on strings, a radio left on. We looked for an extension service that publishes any of these as effective against raptors and did not find one. What the publications recommend, consistently, is a physical barrier.

The mechanism is not mysterious. A hawk hunting a known food source returns to it, and a stationary object that never does anything stops being frightening. A net does not habituate.

The mesh decision, which is the only real decision

Netting is sold by mesh size and almost nothing else, and the published guidance pushes in two directions at once. For raptors, any mesh small enough to stop the bird reaching through will do, and that is a wide range. For wild birds, University of Maryland Extension is specific: “Open poultry houses should be enclosed by fine meshing to prevent entry by wild birds.”

So the honest framing is: every mesh here answers the hawk. The mesh size is really choosing whether you are also solving the sparrows-in-the-feeder problem, and paying for it in coverage per dollar and in how much leaf litter and snow the net carries each winter.

How we judged these

On mesh size, panel area, construction and what each seller will commit to in writing — which, as with candlers, turns out to be almost nothing. Not one netting in this category publishes a breaking strain, a UV rating or a polymer grade, so service life cannot be compared and we have not pretended otherwise. What is checkable is mesh, area and whether the net is knotted or woven, and that is what the ranking rests on.

Hardware cloth sits at the bottom of the list on purpose. It is not a run roof in any practical sense — it is heavy, expensive by the square foot and needs a frame — but it is on the page because it is what the published guidance calls for on the coop itself, and because a reader who arrives here after losing a bird often has a structure problem as well as an airspace one.

If you are buying the run rather than roofing one you own, the run roundup ranks walk-in runs on the one figure their makers publish, and several arrive with a cover already fitted.

Fitting it so it stays up

The failure modes are consistent and none of them is the netting giving way in the middle.

• Tension it, then tension it again a month later. A sagging net that touches the top of the run is a net something can work against from above and a support the birds can roost on from below.
• Overlap the seams generously. A gap at a join is a gap, and this is why the roll size matters more than it looks on the listing.
• Spread the load at every fixing. Netting tears from a point. A batten or a length of wire along the edge turns point loads into line loads.
• Think about snow. A loaded net is heavy and a flat net holds everything that lands on it. A slight pitch, or a wire ridge down the middle, keeps it shedding.
• Close the gap between net and fence. The commonest miss is a few inches of daylight along the top of the run wall, which is exactly where a ground-climbing predator comes in and where a panicking bird gets out.