I can tell you from personal experience that raptors are remarkably difficult to provoke. The harriers where I live are routinely harassed by blue jays (also corvids, if you didn't already know) and even robins, but it takes several minutes of continuous dive-bombing before the harrier finally decides to bugger off. I need some better optics, but when I finally get some, perhaps I'll be able to take some decent pictures of such avian antics. For now, the chickens will have to suffice.
BTW, do you butcher your own cattle, and if so, how difficult is it?
They are super tolerant (or patient), or maybe it's top of the food chain indifference? lol! The raven dive bombed them in random intervals for hours, they didn't seem perturbed.
And I love chicken pictures😊
Cattle butchering is a pretty big chore, especially if you don't have the right equipment (a tractor works well for suspending the carcass and you absolutely have to have a mechanized grinder for all that hamburger, and if it isn't fall/winter you better have a cooler to age the carcass!). I have done it before, but these days I prefer to leave it to the expert, my dear friend Butcher Bob is an artist. He's been butchering in these parts since 1969 and is still going strong even though he's in his 80's (It's a multi generation, family run operation).
That said, we do our smaller stuff like deer, goats, rabbits, chickens, and the occasional pig (I really like Bob's sausage recipe though, so he usually does the pigs too!).
"Top of the food chain indifference," LOL, I'm definitely using that one!
I doubt I'll ever start raising any large animals, but it's always nice to know what to expect. One of my neighbours raised pigs for a while, but I think it was a bit much for him; they kept escaping and hanging out with the other neighbour's goats.
I wouldn't be surprised if the goats didn't instigate the pig escape initiative. Now there's a species of animal that is in the dictionary under the mischief entry. Good lords did they cause me no end of grief for the fifteen years I raised them.
But they were so tasty and cute at times lol!
And I wish more people were as awesome as you when it comes to livestock. They automatically want to go big first, and I am like, "You want to try some chickens and rabbits before you go with that $5000, 1200lb dairy cow?" I know so many people who have gotten hurt or worse yet, the animals got hurt or perished, because people were in such a dang hurry to homestead that they didn't put the learning work in.
Oof, and I didn't mean to get all sermony there, lol, hope you are having a lovely morning with your hens😊