JARROD'S JUNK: Lions and Tigers and Bears, Oh My!

Having a lot of project based classes this semester made for a quick round of final exams this semester, and I was soon back at home in the sticks. Yet during finals week, there was some commotion back home as the family informed me that the chickens were under attack. Dad had gotten them for eggs, but once my sisters gave all of the chickens names, we've come to think of them as more of our pets and such problems are regarded as a bit of a big deal :)

So it appeared that the chicken coop had been facing an intruder, and a single chicken was taken from the coop two nights in a row. The white fence in the picture below got completely ripped open from the top to the ground. It's tough to see it in this picture since I took it after my dad and sister had already covered the hole with a couple layers more of the black vermin wire. The chicken coop has its own door in the back, which opens in the back out into a small area that is fenced in on all sides as well as the top and opens at a gate to let the chickens out. What happened that night was that the door to the chicken coop was left open, and although the gate of the fence was all closed up, something was able to rip through the fence and take one of the chickens.

The Mended Fence

The gang reinforced the fencing and had the chicken coop on lockdown the next night, seemingly ready for deterring whatever might come back again from the previous night, only to find out the next day that something had ripped the entire wall of the coop with the chickens' nesting boxes right off and taken another chicken.

The next night there were no problems in the chicken coop, and when I got home from school the next day, we set up the trail/game cameras. The fam had been watching a lot of the show "Finding Bigfoot" on Animal Planet lately, so they knew the drill haha. There was never any shortage of wildlife in the rural area in which we live, and the game cam had picked up all sorts of deer, foxes, raccoons and such in the past, but we were interested to finally find out what could have possibly done that kind of damage to the chicken coop.

The investigation continued with raccoons being the primary suspects, as they were known to frequently kill chickens and had regularly been around our property, such as the one in the picture above stealing birdseed from the feeders at night.

Dad and I threw together a quick trap using scrap wood and covered with that black vermin wire. Basically, it's set up so that there's a door hanging above the entry and when a creature enters and goes to eat whatever food is on the inside, it bumps the dowel with the pin holding up the door so that it slams down behind him. With an 18"x18" opening, it was big enough to catch a pretty sizable raccoon.

I don't know if it was the long winter finally ending and letting every creature of hibernation at once, but we had a wide variety of all different raccoons and foxes caught on the camera at every hour of the night, such as the raccoon below at 4 in the morning. The chickens remained unharmed for several days though and it appeared that the nighttime critters on camera were only there for the apple, peanut butter, and chicken wings that we left as bait rather than trying to kill the chickens.

We had caught a couple of them one day, but they had managed to overcome our efforts to trap them by biting through the wire and squeezing through a narrow opening between the wooden slats. The fact that the raccoons were able to break through the trap so easily seemed to indicate that they would also have been able to break in through the chickens' fence just the same, although nothing had been bothering the chickens since.