This fall my wife let the chicken coop population dwindle a little bit. She let the chickens roam free during the day, and several got picked off by coyotes, then she sold a bunch of them to a local Hmong farmer, so that by the time November rolled around there were only five chickens and one duck left out in the coop. She and my daughter have been looking over the chicken catalogs (yes, believe it or not there is such a thing as a chicken catalog), planning what chicks to buy and raise for next year. On this past Saturday, though, when my daughter went out to feed the chickens, one of them and the duck were dead, attacked by some critter inside the coop! Not knowing what to think, my wife and daughter searched for holes in the coop to try to identify an entrance, but didn't find anything. Then, Sunday night when feeding time came again, two more chickens had been killed, and the lone rooster was pretty torn up, and not looking to be long for this world.
This time, they made a more concerted search, and found a small 2" diameter hole in one corner of the coop, covered up by the wood shavings on the floor. Figuring that this must have been the entry point, they took the live trap that we have and put it in over the hole in the wall, so that the critter, whatever it was, would have to enter the trap in order to come through the hole. Then they moved the two remaining hens to a different building, and left the rooster in the coop.
Last night we checked again, and this time the rooster was dead. The trap was sprung, but hadn't moved, so the killer must have gotten in via another route. Refusing to admit defeat, my wife and daughter searched again through the coop, and found a different hole this time, in the floor of the coop where the water line comes in. This time they put the trap over the hole, and baited it with the dead rooster's head! Yikes, this was like a bad horror movie.
Tonight my wife came home from work and we immediately went to the coop to see if we'd caught anything. Sure enough, the culprit was in the trap! I brought him into the barn to get him into the light and get his picture:
This is a mink. He probably lived down by our pond during the summer, and was now trying to feed himself off the flock of chickens in the winter months. He did a pretty good job for a couple of days there LOL! My daughter wants to terminate his existence, but cooler heads have prevailed, and we will just drive him 20 miles or so from here and let him go. Just in case there's more than one, we'll set the trap again tonight and see what we get.
As a footnote, I found the photos of the live trap with the mink inside juxtaposed with my semi-finished sheet metal intake to be a rather existential portrait
