A fox leaves tracks. A hawk leaves nothing but feathers and a few seconds you didn't see coming. Of all the predators that take backyard chickens, hawks and owls are the ones most keepers feel the least prepared for — partly because they attack from a direction most coop designs never bother to defend, and partly because the usual predator-proofing advice (bigger latch, deeper trench) doesn't apply to something that drops out of the sky.
There's also a legal wrinkle here that doesn't exist with raccoons or foxes, and it matters enough to deal with first.
Hawks and owls are protected wildlife in Ontario — this isn't optional
Under Ontario's Fish and Wildlife Conservation Act, 1997, hawks and owls are listed as specially protected raptors in the wildlife schedules regulation (O. Reg. 669/98, Schedule 7). That list covers common Ontario species like the Red-tailed Hawk, Cooper's Hawk, Sharp-shinned Hawk, Broad-winged Hawk, and owls including the Great Horned, Barred, Barn, and Snowy Owl, along with eagles, falcons, ospreys, harriers, and turkey vultures. Harming, trapping, or killing a bird on that list — or disturbing an active nest — is an offence under the Act, and it carries meaningful penalties.
It's worth clearing up a common point of confusion: the federal Migratory Birds Convention Act, which protects ducks, geese, and songbirds, generally does not cover hawks, owls, eagles, or falcons. Environment and Climate Change Canada's own list of species outside federal jurisdiction names hawks and owls specifically, noting they were historically considered pests under the 1916 convention and so were left out of it. That gap doesn't leave them unprotected, though — it just means the protection comes from Ontario's provincial law instead of the federal one. Practically, the result is the same: shooting, trapping, or otherwise harming a hawk or owl over your coop is not a legal option in Ontario, whatever federal rules you may have heard quoted.
We're not lawyers and this isn't legal advice — if you're dealing with a bird that's become a serious, repeated problem, Ontario's Ministry of Natural Resources has a process for authorized interventions. But for the overwhelming majority of backyard situations, the fix is exclusion and deterrence, not confrontation.
Owls hunt at night. Hawks hunt by day. That difference changes your defense.
Hawks are daytime hunters almost without exception — they rely on sharp daylight vision to spot movement from a perch or in flight, and they stop hunting around dusk. Owls are built the opposite way: large eyes, low-light vision, and silent flight adapted for hunting after dark. Great Horned Owls — widely reported as the owl most likely to take poultry across most of North America, Ontario included — do most of their hunting at night but will push into dusk and dawn, especially when they're feeding owlets or a night's hunting hasn't gone well.
That split matters because it means "protect the coop from raptors" is really two separate problems with two separate windows:
- Daytime risk (hawks): any time your flock is out in an open run during daylight hours, especially midday when hawks are actively hunting.
- Dusk-into-night risk (owls): the window from last light until your flock is fully shut in, and any time birds are accidentally left out after dark.
Most hawk losses happen because chickens had unsupervised access to open sky during the day. Most owl losses happen because a door didn't get closed before dark, or a bird roosted outside the coop.
What actually stops a hawk or owl — the short list
The research-backed advice here is unglamorous but effective. Colorado State University Extension recommends covering the run itself — welded wire, chicken wire, or netting overhead, or even a crisscrossed grid of overhead wires — as the baseline defense against both hawks and owls. A few points worth being specific about:
- Cover the run, not just the coop. A solid coop does nothing for a flock that free-ranges or uses an open-top run during the day, which is when hawks strike.
- Chicken wire works fine overhead, even though it fails as a ground barrier. The weak mesh and large gaps that let a raccoon reach through at ground level aren't a problem when the threat is coming from above and can't get a grip to pull through. Hardware cloth is still the better choice if you're building new, but existing chicken-wire tops over a run are a reasonable stopgap against raptors specifically.
- Close the coop before dusk, not at dusk. Because owls can start hunting slightly before full dark, "close up at sunset" leaves a gap. Extension guidance is to shut birds in before dusk if owls are a known problem in your area.
- Reduce open sky over favourite perches and dust-bathing spots. Hawks often scout from a fence post or tree before diving; a run with no overhead cover near the coop's entrance or a popular dust bath is the easiest target.
- Learn your flock's alarm calls. Chickens aren't passive about this. Researchers have shown that male domestic fowl give acoustically distinct alarm calls for aerial threats versus ground threats, and hens respond differently to each — crouching and scattering for an aerial call, staying upright and alert for a ground one. That's a real early-warning system already built into your flock; see our guide to what your flock's alarm calls actually mean for more on reading those signals yourself.
None of this needs to be elaborate. A run that's fully enclosed — sides and top — with a coop that gets closed before last light handles the vast majority of hawk and owl risk without any ongoing vigilance from you.
Where acoustic monitoring fits — and where it honestly doesn't
This is the part we'd rather undersell than oversell. Acoustic predator detection — the kind of nighttime audio monitoring Coop Watch does — listens for sustained commotion and distress sound and arms after dark, which lines up well with the owl threat window. If an owl gets into an open run or an improperly secured coop overnight, the sudden noise is exactly the kind of event the system is built to catch, and it'll push an alert with an audio clip to your phone so you can check on the flock immediately.
It's a much weaker tool against daytime hawks, for a simple reason: a hawk strike in broad daylight, while you're not watching, is primarily a daytime problem, and nighttime acoustic monitoring isn't built around that window. The defense against hawks is almost entirely physical — a covered run — plus whatever supervision you can give the flock during free-range time. Coop Watch doesn't identify what made the noise, either; it hears something loud and distress-like and leaves the judgment call to you, which is exactly why the audio clip matters more than the alert itself.
Used this way, the two layers complement each other rather than overlap: hardware cloth and a covered run handle the structural risk around the clock, a closed coop before dusk handles the owl window specifically, and overnight acoustic monitoring is the backstop for the nights something still goes wrong — a door left ajar, a gap that was missed, a bird that didn't make it in before lockup.
Start listening tonight
You don't need new hardware to add that overnight backstop — just an old Android phone with a working mic and Wi-Fi, placed in the coop. Coop Watch offers a free 7-day trial, no credit card required, so you can see what a normal night sounds like before deciding whether it's worth keeping around. If you're still working out the rest of your predator defenses, our season-by-season guide to Ontario predators is a good next stop, and when you're ready, you can see current plans on the pricing page.