Rats and raccoons and chickens

This is what 70 chicks looks like. What? You are only counting seven chicks? Well, yes, this is what 70 chicks looks like after 47 get eaten by rats and 16 get eaten by raccoons. It's been years since we had predator problems this bad, and we have actually never had any problems losing chickens prior to last fall.

Last fall, raccoons got almost all of our laying hens. Earlier this spring, rats got into the stall that we use as a brooder, and before we realized what was happening, they had eaten all but three. Not to be dissuaded, we got more chicks. We put them in a large water trough with an old window screen over the top, and one day, we discovered a hole in the screen, and some of the chicks were missing.

Ultimately only three of the original chicks went out to the front yard into a chicken tractor. They were doing great until one morning when we walked out there to find feathers everywhere. The raccoon had been able to pull two of the chickens through the 2" by 4" welded wire, but the third one was laying in the chicken tractor decapitated. Chickens have terrible night vision, which is why a raccoon was able to grab them and kill them through the wire.

The second group of chicks went out a few weeks ago, and yesterday we realized that of the 13 Silkies (the white ones with blue beaks and faces) that went into the chicken tractor, only 9 were left. We set up two live traps for raccoons and baited them with cat food. Around 10:00 last night as I was brushing my teeth, we heard what sounded like a chorus of Alvin and the chipmunks on high speed. Mike grabbed a gun and ran outside but before he got there, the raccoon had escaped from the trap and was nowhere to be seen. Our English shepherd Porter went running around the pond in the dark, but he didn't find the raccoon either. We hoped that the coon had been so scared by being trapped that maybe he wouldn't come back. Then again, I silently thought that maybe he had simply learned to not go into a trap again.

This morning, my fear was realized as we found four more Silkies missing, as well as a white rock. We had put a board and a cinderblock in front of the hole that we found yesterday, and it had been moved. Raccoons are stronger and smarter than we thought. To add insult to injury, a chicken was in the trap. Apparently she was trying to escape and ran into the trap that was just outside the chicken tractor. Yes, that means the raccoon totally ignored the cat food in the trap and instead went for the live chickens.

Five chickens of this size is a lot of chicken meat for a raccoon, so we are wondering if there is a whole family that's feeding off of our young chickens. So far we have only ever seen one raccoon. Mike saw one walking out of the barn one night as he was finishing up chores, and our new intern saw one walk out of the chicken house at dusk one night. Oddly, he didn't have a chicken. Perhaps he was just in the mood for some chicken grain or eggs at the moment and figured he'd come back for a chicken entree later? But the chicken house is locked up tight every night, so we haven't lost any from there.

We have another batch of 33 chicks in the barn, and so far we've managed to keep them safe. They are in a water trough that is standing on top of another upside-down water trough, and it's surrounded by rat traps, which catch rats regularly. When we first realized we had a problem with rats in April, we caught 13 rats in the first two days! We do have a cat out there who is also a great mouser, and he has caught several rats, as well. I don't understand why we never had a problem with rats in all these years until now. My only thought is that the huge fox snake that lived in the barn for years probably died. He was at least six feet long, and the ones we've seen so far this year have only been about three feet long, which is perhaps not big enough to eat rats yet. Or maybe Patches the 12-year-old cat that is now retired in the house was a better mouser than we realized.

As for the raccoons, I'm not sure what we'll do, but we have to have a plan for tonight, or we probably won't have any chicks left by tomorrow morning. We will definitely put Lucy the Great Pyrenees in the front yard, but I feel like we also need to do something else to keep the chicks safe. Perhaps we can put a rabbit cage inside the chicken tractor just for tonight, so that there will be two barriers between the chicks and the coons, and maybe as the coons are trying to figure out how to get the chicks, Lucy will take care of them.

A new livestock guardian

Protecting livestock from predators is an ongoing battle. It seems like we can never quite get control of the situation. We've had an Anatolian shepherd for eight years, and he was doing a great job the first couple years until we started having problems with packs of coyotes. So, we bought four llamas, and a year later, we got two more. They were doing a great job working in pairs on three different parts of the farm until one of them died. He was 18, which is old for a llama, but alas, his partner was then left in a bad situation working alone, and we had our first sheep loss in four years this summer.

And as you might know, eight years old is old for a livestock guardian. I think Sovalye might be feeling the desire to retire too. When that raccoon got into the chicken house a couple of months ago, he walked in when Jonathan called him, and then he walked right back out again. A couple of years ago, he would have taken care of the raccoon in short order.

You might recall that we also have Porter, an English shepherd, and although he is a great guard dog when it comes to strangers, he only has the urge to herd raccoons and the like, which would be humorous if the coons were not interested in eating my chickens and turkeys.

So, we decided to add another dog to the homestead. Meet Lucy, a Great Pyrenees from Triple Creek Dairy --

She was living in the goat barn when I picked her up, and when we brought her home, she looked rather scared and nervous until she saw the goats. She immediately perked up and ran straight to them. Because she is a DOG -<gasp>- the goats were not terribly excited to meet her, but they are slowly starting to come around. She understands how to deal with them, and if she sees them coming at her, she drops to the ground so they can't butt her.

For the first week, we kept her in the barn in a kidding pen next to Carmen and her kids so that they could keep each other company through the hog panel partition, but Carmen couldn't beat her up. We let her out whenever we were outside so we could supervise her with the livestock, both for her protection and the other animals.

So far, she has shown absolutely zero interest in chasing any of them. I just love her personality and intuition about interacting with other animals. She has been spending the last few days in an interior pasture where a pig and a few turkeys live.

To help me remember that she was born in 2012, I decided to name her Lucy Burns because this is an election year, and Lucy Burns was one of the "baddest" suffragettes of them all. She worked for women's rights in both England and the U.S., and she was arrested more than any suffragette. She also led hunger strikes in the jails, and when they tried to force-feed her with a tube in her nose, it took five guards to hold her down. She was fearless, which is how I hope my little Lucy Burns will be when it comes to predators!

Broiling and steamed

No, this post is not about food. "Broiling" is about temperatures in excess of 100 degrees every day for about a week now. Today is supposed to get to 111 degrees, and it was 101.3 at 10:13 this morning, which was not what I wanted to see.

Combine these temperatures with no rain for more than two weeks, and what do you get? The grass is turning brown, and on a farm, that is not a cosmetic complaint. We are going to start watering a couple areas of pasture. Of course the garden is not happy either, so we have been watering the vegetables plants for awhile already.

So far the animals are doing okay, although I did have one goat that quit eating. Earlier this week I realized she had a pretty heavy load of parasites, so I treated her for that, but she still didn't regain her appetite. I took her to the U of I vet clinic yesterday, and they couldn't find anything wrong with her, so I'm assuming that the weather is just making it harder for her to recover. We've put her in the barn office with an air conditioner until tomorrow when the heat wave is supposed to break.

"Steamed" in today's title is about how mad I am that something -- I'm assuming another raccoon (or two) -- has completely wiped out our flock of heritage turkeys. We found the remains of three, but we haven't seen a live turkey in days. We now have a trap set, but so far, nothing has been caught. The number of chickens and ducks is also decreasing. It seems that coons are bad everywhere this year. We haven't had a problem in about eight years ourselves. A friend was saying that she thinks it was due to our very mild winter and early spring, and I agree. Baby raccoons born at zero degrees are far less likely to survive than those born at 50 degrees.

It is going to be strange without turkeys roaming around. We've had breeding turkeys ever since we moved out here ten years ago. Unfortunately, the hatchery sent us almost all broad breasted turkeys in our order last month, so with only two Spanish black poults, the odds are 50/50 that it's a male and a female. But it's not a great idea to have only one female with a male anyway.

So, for now, there isn't much we can do other than wait for the heat wave to break and the raccoons to wander into the trap.

Raccoon woes

I had hoped to fall asleep early tonight, but that's not going to happen. I was all snug in bed at 10:15 reading about dog aggression in Temple Grandin's book, Animals in Translation, and I heard a chicken squawking outside. I called downstairs and asked Jonathan to see what was happening because chickens go to bed with the sun, and hens like to get a good night's sleep, which means no squawking in the middle of the night unless something serious is happening.

A few seconds after hearing the sliding glass door close, Jonathan is yelling, but I can't understand what he's saying. I run to the window and yell, "What?" He yells for me to come right away and bring the gun. I grab a .22 pistol and run outside. He meets me at the chicken house door and says there is a raccoon that has climbed up to the rafters. I complain about not wanting to put a hole in the roof or the wall but don't see any alternatives. We can't just leave and say, "Have a nice dinner." Chickens are running around, squawking, flapping their wings, and dust is flying. I am incredibly grateful that we have a light in the chicken house.

I point the gun at the raccoon's head, then second guess my shooting ability and aim for the middle of his chest and pull the trigger. He falls, hits the ground, and starts running. I know I've hit him because I see blood. I pull the slide back on the gun and see a bullet fly out. I aim again, pull the trigger, and nothing happens. I realize the slide is stuck in the open position. I can't remember what I'm supposed to do now! I haven't held a gun in two or three years. Every now and then Mike tells me that I need to know what to do in case of an emergency, so I walk out to wherever he is shooting at a target, I take the gun, fire multiple rounds into the center of the target and hand the gun back to him, asking, "You happy now?" I had never realized until tonight how foolish I was to assume that I only needed to know how to shoot straight.

The raccoon is huddled in a corner of the chicken house, and I tell Jonathan to watch him while I run inside the house to call Mike, who is obviously not home. If he were home, he would be the one out here, and I would still be reading my book! He has barely said "hello" into the phone when I blurt out, "There is a coon in the chicken house. I shot him, but I need to shoot him again, and the gun isn't working." I'm still fiddling with the pistol, and at that moment, I realize what I need to do to get the slide to close. I hang up, run out to the chicken house, take aim at the raccoon again, pull the trigger and hear a faint click. Ugh! I try again and hear another faint click! The idea of leaving the raccoon until Mike got home briefly entered my mind, but I didn't want it to suffer for another hour.

I run back to the house to call Mike again. He suggests I grab the .45 pistol, which I don't want to do because that's overkill for a raccoon, and I really have visions of blowing a big hole in the wall of the chicken house. He suggests the rifle, but I haven't fired a rifle in I-don't-know-how-many years. And if I was doing so badly with a .22 pistol, which is what I've used the most, then a rifle sounded like a really bad idea. Somehow we finally come to the conclusion that the pistol was out of bullets. I could not figure out how to get the magazine out of the gun, which was very frustrating because I was sure that I had at least done that much in my infrequent practice sessions. Ultimately I learn that this is a gun that Mike inherited from his father after his Alzheimer's diagnosis. It is obviously different than the one that Mike has had since his days on the Naval Academy pistol team 30+ years ago -- the gun that I had always practiced with. On the bright side, I had never touched this gun before and was happy to know that I was not entirely senile!

Mike explains how to load a single round into the chamber, and I head back to the chicken house. This time, I aim at the raccoon's forehead and pull the trigger.

It is dead.

I walk to the door of the chicken house, never taking my eyes off the raccoon in the corner. I head back to the house and call Mike to tell him that it's over. I head upstairs, thinking about getting some sleep, but that's not happening.

I've learned a couple of really important things tonight. First, I need to know exactly how every part of a gun works if I'm going to use it. And I'm sure this won't be the last time that I need to do that. This was not the first predator that thought our farm looked like a nice buffet, and sometimes we have to put down one of our animals in an emergency situation, like when the lamb was born without an anus and was having seizures.

And second, if I'm going to shoot at a predator, I should shoot at the head. It was pretty terrifying to be in the same room with an injured animal that could have attacked me.

And I suppose there is a third thing that I've learned and that is that I need to have a refresher course every few months. The more you do something, the more it becomes second nature. I know that I don't have to pull the slide back after I fire the first shot, but in a panic, I forgot, pulled back the slide unnecessarily and ejected the second and final bullet. I never want to find myself face to face with a rabid fox or coyote and in a panic.

I often say that there were a lot of things that were not on my radar screen when we moved out here, but I give examples like tapping maple trees and making our own syrup. I certainly never expected to turn into Annie Oakley. I'm still not entirely comfortable with the idea, but you don't find too many people living on farms who don't use guns. And I'm certainly not going to beat an animal to death with a shovel like I heard one man talk about doing a few years ago. It is kind of odd that I was reading Temple Grandin's book when all of this started tonight. In the movie about her life, she says, "Nature is cruel, but we don't have to be," which is true. I can't bear the thought of any type of predator tearing apart one of my chickens or sheep, but I still don't want to be as cruel as the predators.