>>310983I'm the anon you are replying to. Sorry for the late reply.
>Does it need to be all field or would chickens enjoy a stroll through the woods and under brush.They'd use both.
>They'll eat the oyster shells for calcium?Yes. It is in the form of small chips about half the size of your pinkie finger nail on average.
>Also should I be super concerned about hawks?Yes. Without adequate shelter from hawks, they won't use open ground as much, if there are hawks in your area. One hawk can kill a lot of chickens. You can have natural cover or artificial cover. I have both. Briar patches and hawk hides. The hawk hides are just boards and old roofing sitting on top of upright cinder blocks and weighed down with more cinder blocks to keep wind from flipping them. The chickens love them. It is the only way to extend their range further out into the open field areas. I have 6 hawk hides all over their rather large yard in my orchard. They hide under them and sun themselves on top. They can also hide underneath the chicken coop where they have many dust bathes.
The next danger is from raccoons. They can kill all your chickens in a single night leaving a big bloody massacre and headless bodies all over. Always lock up your chickens just after they go to roost. It only takes one time for you to forget and for you to lose all your chickens to raccoons. I use a padlock on my main coop because I've had raccoons open doors that only had a hasp with a nail shoved through the hole. On my chick cage I have a long rod that goes through 2 hasps and is fastened with a hitch pin. Nothing has ever opened either of those locking systems.
>pic related and a repost, showing my hawk hides and the hawk that killed my chickens before i put up the hides 