I am both happy and sad to report that we finally caught the coon that was savaging our poultry barn coop.  Happy, because I hated to see the dead hen carcases laying about, or the tell tale pile of feathers from a lost bird and having to tell the girls that another hen was gone.  But sad because I hate to see any animal, especially a wild animal, have to leave this place.  Still, it is good to be done, hopefully, of this spring’s bad varmint.

I apparently am getting better at trapping things…  My first night on coon duty I caught Duke, our cat. Apparently he likes peanut butter sardine sandwiches.  The second night I caught a meat chicken!  Apparently it was loose and got into the trap and well, looked pretty pathetic in the morning.  But the third night was the charm.  I got this little female in the trap.

Our neighbor is worried that she might have been working in tandem with another, possibly a bigger male.  Just because of the amount of killings going on.  He suggested that we continue to set the trap for awhile to make sure.  So far, so good, no dead birds, no sprung trap.

It amazes me just how these guys can get into the coops and cause trouble.  We worked to secure the coop even more and yet, they just find another way in.  It was stealing eggs when it couldn’t get in to the actual hens.  Not sure if you know, but chickens are extremely vulnerable at night when they roost.  They go into a sort of dormant stage and just don’t react or fight back much to any sort of attack.  In fact, it’s why we always move birds around at night, it’s so easy.  You can just reach in and lift them from their roost and they hardly make a single cluck.  But it’s also why they are so vulnerable at night to predators.  I think we will have to work a little harder to secure this coop even more.  The top of the coop had netting over it, but they ripped that.  So then we used this hard stiff cardboard, which they ripped and bent just enough to squeeze through.  So now… as soon as I can get a little extra help, we are going to just plywood up the very top area.  Nail it down, secure it.  The coop is 7 foot wide by 16 feet long inside the barn.  I’m thinking that 4 sheets of something will work to secure that area.  I don’t think it has to be super thick or expensive, even maybe 1/4 inch would work as long as it’s nailed down tight.  Overlapping a bit.  We sure will give it a try.

But in the meanwhile, we have had a couple of nights of quiet and peace around here.  Thank goodness!