Raccoons are the predator most backyard keepers in Ontario end up dealing with sooner or later — not because they're the most dangerous animal in the woods, but because they're common, they're smart, and they live comfortably alongside people. A fox or coyote wants your flock and leaves if the coop is solid. A raccoon treats a weak coop like a puzzle box, and it will come back and work on it.
That last part matters more than most predator-proofing checklists admit. Raccoons aren't just strong — they're persistent problem-solvers. University of Wyoming researchers set up a puzzle box with a sliding bolt latch — the kind of mechanism close to what you'd find on a real coop door — at sites around Laramie with heavy raccoon traffic, including a residential yard, a spot behind a food store, and an area near a barn, and tested it on 35 wild raccoons. Over three months, 8 of them, a bit under a quarter, learned to open it — a lower rate than the roughly 65% success researchers had seen in an earlier, separate study with captive raccoons, likely because real backyards don't offer the same free time and low stakes a lab does. It's one city, one study, and 35 animals, so treat the exact numbers loosely — but the direction is clear: most raccoons won't crack a simple latch on the first night, and "most won't" isn't the same as "none will," especially when a coop gets visited more than once.
That's the mindset to build around: not "can a raccoon theoretically get through this," but "will this still be closed after twenty nights of a raccoon trying."
Chicken wire keeps chickens in. It doesn't keep raccoons out.
This is the single most common and most consequential mistake in backyard coop building, and it's an easy one to make because "chicken wire" sounds like exactly the right product for a chicken coop. It isn't — the hexagonal mesh was designed to stop birds from wandering off, not to stop something determined from getting in.
A raccoon doesn't need to tear chicken wire to kill through it, though it often can. It just needs to get a paw through one of the hexagonal gaps, which are plenty wide for a raccoon's narrow forepaw. From there it can grab, hold, and pull — and a bird roosting against the mesh has nowhere to retreat to. This is consistently described across poultry-keeping guides as one of the most common ways coops with chicken-wire walls lose birds even when the door was locked and nothing was ever "broken into."
The fix is hardware cloth: a welded or woven steel mesh with small square openings, usually recommended at around 1/2 inch, in a reasonably heavy gauge (commonly 16–19 gauge). The small, rigid squares don't give a paw anywhere to get a grip, and the heavier wire resists tearing and prying in a way chicken wire simply doesn't. It costs more, and it's worth it. Use it on every opening a predator could reach: walls, windows, vents, and the run.
Two details that get skipped and shouldn't:
- Fasteners matter. Staples pull out under sustained pressure. Screws with fender washers hold far better over months of a raccoon leaning on the same seam.
- Digging predators need an apron, not just a wall. A buried or outward-flared skirt of hardware cloth — commonly recommended at around 12 inches deep, or extended out along the ground instead of down — stops an animal from simply digging under the edge of a run that looks solid from the outside. We go into apron design in more detail in our guide to building a predator-proof run, since the run is usually the weaker half of a coop setup.
The latch is the other half of the problem
A gravity latch or a simple hook-and-eye closes with one motion, and a raccoon's paws are dexterous enough to undo a single motion. That's not a guess — it's the behavior the latch studies above were built around. Slide bolts are a step up but still a single, simple action a persistent animal can eventually stumble into.
What actually holds up is a closure that needs two independent actions that aren't the same motion repeated — a spring-loaded hasp plus a separate locking carabiner, for example, or an actual keyed or combination padlock. The carabiner trick in particular shows up constantly in raccoon-proofing guides because it's cheap, fast to use yourself, and requires a squeeze-and-rotate motion that doesn't resemble anything a raccoon encounters while foraging.
Apply the same logic to nest box lids and any secondary doors — they're often an afterthought, and "afterthought" is exactly where a working raccoon will end up spending its time.
What a raccoon actually attempting entry sounds like
This is where coop design and monitoring meet. A raccoon working on a latch or testing a seam in the wire isn't quiet. It's rattling, scratching, and bumping at the hardware for minutes at a time, and a flock that senses something at the mesh will not stay silent about it — hens have specific, loud alarm vocalizations for exactly this situation, which we cover in detail in our guide to chicken distress calls. The combination of mechanical rattling and distressed birds is a sustained, above-baseline sound event — which is precisely the kind of thing an acoustic monitor is built to catch and the kind of thing a camera pointed at a dark coop usually isn't, for reasons we lay out in our acoustic predator detection guide.
To be clear about what that gets you: Coop Watch doesn't identify the sound as "raccoon" and it doesn't do anything to the raccoon. It listens for nighttime commotion against your coop's normal quiet, and when it hears something sustained and out of the ordinary, it sends your phone an alert with a short audio clip so you can judge for yourself what's happening and decide whether to go check. A good hardware setup is still what actually stops the raccoon — the alert just means you're not finding out what happened from a cleaned-up coop the next morning.
If the worst already happened
If you're reading this after a loss rather than before one, our predator forensics guide walks through how to read the signs at the scene, and our broader season-by-season guide to Ontario predators covers how raccoon pressure compares to foxes, coyotes, weasels, and hawks through the year. If you're trying to decide between a camera, a motion sensor, and sound-based monitoring for your own setup, our alarm comparison lays out the tradeoffs plainly.
The short version
Swap chicken wire for hardware cloth everywhere a raccoon could reach, fasten it with screws and washers instead of staples, bury or flare an apron against digging, and put a two-step lock on every door and lid — including the nest box. Do that and you've closed off the overwhelming majority of raccoon break-ins before they start. For the nights when something still tests the wire anyway, acoustic monitoring means you find out while it's happening instead of at sunrise.
Coop Watch runs on an old Android phone you already have sitting in a drawer — no new hardware to buy, no SIM card, just a charger and your Wi-Fi. You can try it free for 7 nights, no credit card required, and hear for yourself what your coop sounds like on an ordinary night before you ever need it for an extraordinary one.