I used to have chickens, and everything likes their flavor. I'll just tell you about a couple of my experiences with them.
One day I was out mowing the grass with a push mower, and a mother hen and her little fuzzy yellow babies were within ten feet of me when a big red-tailed fell like a rock out of the sky and popped it's wings open about shoulder high, snagged a baby and was out of sight in the woods in less than 5 seconds. The scene went from peace and tranquility to distress and a dead baby within a second. I was shocked that the hawk had no apparent fear of me.
Something I saw with hawks, coyotes, and owls is that once they pick out their target, they do not see anything else. You can walk out in front of them and wave your arms, but you might as well not be there. I almost hit a hawk one day while driving down the highway. The hawk swooped across the road right in front of me at about 2-3 feet above the ground at high speed. It did a quick "hop" maneuver over the roadside vine-covered fence and came up with a bird from the other side of the fence.
Most of the time when a hen had babies, I would keep her and the babies under a cage/pen with 1" chicken wire on the top and sides. Each day I would drag it to a new clean spot of grass for them to eat. The cages/pens were pretty heavy. One day I heard the very loud screaming of a red tailed hawk, and when I looked out the back door, I saw a hawk hanging on the side of that cage screaming and snatching on the wire with it's claws. After a moment of total frustration, it flew into the woods nearby. I checked the hen and all seemed to be well. None of them died of fright.
WA
Edit: Once a predator of any kind gets a taste of chicken, it will count on getting dinner there every day till the last chicken is gone. When I got chickens, predators came from everywhere. Owls were the worst. I called a game warden to discuss how to solve the problem. He told me very bluntly that if I wanted to keep chickens, I would have to pen them up, because I could not do anything to "HIS" owls. Then he staked me out for a solid month watching every night for me to do something to his owls, but I had not just fallen off a turnip truck. Eventually it became just too much work and aggravation to keep them confined and predators and neighbors' dogs finished them off. One of the last things that happened was that a huge rattlesnake came in through the rusted tin at the bottom of my chicken house and killed a pile of half-grown chickens. It ate five (yes, I always had a count on them) of them and left the others lying there. You think I am lying, but I later found a rattlesnake big enough to do that within 50 feet of where that chicken house had been.
In Texas state and federal laws make it high risk to harm any predatory bird of any kind.
Edit: I know that a snake did that because of the slithering track it left in the sand.
