The Predator Becomes the Prey

A while back we lamented the fact that we lost 39 hens to mink.  Those critters savagely slaughtered our egg layers.  It was only after I killed some squirrels and baited the traps with their blood and guts that I was able to catch the male and female in the trap.  They were summarily executed by firing squad.  We haven't had an issue with mink since that day.  I still drive around and see mink that have been killed while crossing the road.  Perhaps I shouldn't, but every time I see a mink carcass on the road, I do a fist pump and break in to a grin.  Mink are vicious killers and they get no sympathy from me.

This morning Tricia hollered, "Kyle, there's a mink on our back porch."  I'm mostly deaf, so I had to confirm what I thought I heard.  Yes, I heard her correctly.  We do have wild creatures like possums and coons and armadillos that will venture near the house, but never mink.  I ran to the gun shelf, pulled down the 12 gauge and loaded it with shells.  I ran out to the back patio and sure enough, that rascal was between the french doors and the back of the fireplace.

I couldn't hardly shoot him there - I'd break the windows and splinter the wood.  That little devil looked at me and bared his teeth.  I bared mine back.  Ginger, our cat, was around and I didn't want her in the crossfire.  The mink made a break for it around the back side of the house, but I had a bead on that beady-eyed creature.  BOOM!  Or you might say, "Pop, goes the weasel."  

Look at the teeth on this varmint!  He can tear some chicken up.  I quickly ran back to the pasture and around the henhouse to see if he had killed any of our chickens, but I found no dead or injured birds.  I put my foot in the photo below for perspective, so that you can see the size of this animal.

What would cause him to come up to the house?  Was he sick?  Rabid?  Did he just have a death wish?  We'll never know, but I'm happy Tricia happened to see him and called me so that I could take care of business.  That's one less mink to kill our chickens.

The Indians, I read in history, helped the pilgrims by teaching them to bury a fish underneath corn seeds to provide slow release fertilizer.  I grabbed a shovel and buried the mink in the garden, sort of next to the goat.  We'll see if mink works as good as fish as a garden fertilizer.

A Mink Coat for My Bride

As we've communicated, we've had one heck of a time with minks.  Last year they killed 39 hens.  When you think about the cost of the birds, the cost of the feed that we ran through them, and the cost of the eggs that we could have eaten and sold, it is mind-boggling the destruction that this little cunning, devious, blood-thirsty varmint causes.

We have since built the flock back up and protected the henhouse by pouring concrete over the entire floor which bars the mink from digging under and getting inside.  Trouble is, minks can get into any one inch square opening - and they found chinks in our "armor."  This year, the same carnage continued.  The other day I opened the henhouse to find 15 hens strewn about on the floor - dead as the proverbial door nail.

I killed 15 squirrels in the yard, gutted them, saving the guts in a bucket and caught a mink!  I thought our troubles were done, but quickly learned that where there's one, there's at least one more.  The next day, in broad daylight, the mink killed two more.  I declared war.  I reset my trap with fresh bloody squirrel guts with a sardine thrown on top for good measure, and caught another!  Here is this cursed creature:

This is a devious hellion, by any definition.  Press the arrow below on the short video and listen to his angry shriek as I walk up on him.  It's a blood-curdling noise, for sure.  No doubt about it.  He knows that he has a cruel payday coming for the violence he's meted out.

The Bible has quite a lot to say about men (and creatures) like this.

Proverbs 1:11: "If they say, Come with us, let us lay wait for blood, let us lurk privily for the innocent without cause:"

 
Proverbs 6:16-19 "These six things doth the Lord hate: yea, seven are an abomination unto him: A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, An heart that deviseth wicked imaginations, feet that be swift in running to mischief, false witness that speaketh lies, and he that soweth discord among brethren.

I instituted Old Testament eye for an eye judgment on him.

Look at those teeth that were used to end the lives of those innocent hens that laid delicious eggs for us.  Oh, the treachery!

But I wasn't done yet.  I had buried the previous mink I trapped in the garden.  At least he'd grow some good vegetables for me.  But this one, I said to myself, "I'm going to skin him and make a mink coat for my wife."  And so, I sharpened my knife, hung the mink from the barn rafters and skinned him out.  I felt like Jeremiah Johnson in the wilderness.  (I messed up the tail.  I'm still a novice furrier.)

With a sharp knife and a little effort, the job was done.  I wish I could say I felt sympathy for the beast, but I felt none.

The pelt of the mink was soft and luxurious.  I was proud of my first foray into the fur trade.

I learned about saving the glands of the mink as an attractant.  You can see them in the gruesome photo below.  I saved the carcass and guts of the mink and have rebaited the trap, using the ill-fated mink as bait to catch more of his brethren.  So far, it's been two nights and no more minks in the trap.  On the bright side, there have been no additional chicken fatalities to report.

With bated breath (pun intended), I presented my wife with her own mink coat.  I could not wait to see her exuberance, her joy, upon my presentation of the luxurious fur.

She was not as excited as I had anticipated.  I know, I know...  It's not really a mink coat.  It's too small.  I'm thinking that I could at least make mink ear muffs for her or something else like mittens.  I'll keep setting the traps to catch more minks.  I want to be vigilant and not let my guard down.  The hens are counting on us.

Matthew 5:5 says, "Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."  The mink, on the other hand shall NOT inherit the earth - at least not our little corner of it.

A Time To Kill

A mink or minks devastated our flock of hens.  I talked to a neighbor down the road and minks wiped out his neighbor's entire flock.  It's not just us.  Misery loves company, I presume, but that doesn't make it any better.  So I began putting a plan into action.  This plan involves retribution.  I gutted all fifteen of the hens that the mink killed and collected it all in a bucket.  Then, for a couple days, I hunted squirrels in the yard, killed 14 of them and added their guts to my bucket.

This may look nasty to you, but to a varmint, like a mink that likes smelly, bloody stuff, this is heaven.

I put a little bit of everything in the back of the trap to try to entice the mink to pay a visit.  You can see a chicken head, a squirrel tail, gizzards and entrails.  Looks appetizing... for a varmint.  The trap is set, along with two others, and we'll see if we're successful in the morning.

We were only somewhat successful.  I caught the neighbor's cat.  She wasn't happy, but she wasn't hurt.  I let her go.  I didn't tell the neighbors.  No harm. No foul.  Let's bait up and try again.

The next night, something had gotten into the trap, eaten the bait, and escaped somehow.  In fact, one of the traps had been drug out into the woods.  I fixed that issue by wiring the trap to the fence.  We'll bait up and try again.

Well, looky here.  In the snap trap, we seem to have caught a fat possum.  

But that's not what we're targeting.  I want to catch the mink that's responsible for the death of so many of our chickens.  And lo and behold, we finally caught the mink!!!

After the arraignment, the perpetrator was given a speedy trial and was found guilty.  At the sentencing, the jury passed down the death penalty.  The sentence was carried out swiftly and efficiently on the mink.

I will continue to bait up the traps nightly, until I catch everything or until I run out of guts in my bucket.

Hopefully, our hens will be spared from the murderous nightly rampages that they've been subject to here lately.

Disaster in the Hen House

At 6 am the alarm clock goes off and I head out to the barn to do the morning chores.  I feed the goats, the cows, and feed the chickens.  Then I open the henhouse to open the nesting boxes.  After sunrise, the solar-powered door opens and the chickens go out to roam on the pasture.  When I opened the door to the hen house, I was met with a startling sight.  There were feathers everywhere.  There were numerous carcasses of dead hens littering the hen house floor.  Carnage and savagery on display.  It was only a few months ago that we worked very hard to cement the floor of the henhouse where mink can't tunnel under and get to the chickens.  Mink had, you'll recall, killed 39 hens back then.  What in the world happened?  The surviving birds had witnessed a murderous rampage and I wondered if they had PTSD.

When I got back from work, I loaded the deceased into a wagon.  There were FIFTEEN dead hens.  Fifteen of them!  But I have a plan.  Like Wyatt Earp exclaimed in the movie, Tombstone, "You tell 'em I'm comin', and hell's comin' with me!"  Phase one of my plan is to gut all these chickens, so I sadly, but resolutely brought the wagon of death to the back patio.

Once I gutted all fifteen birds, I dug a big burial plot in the back of the garden.  If any good can come of this, it's that we're importing some fertility to the garden.  Tossing the birds in the burial plot, I covered them up.

I collected a nice collection of chicken guts.  I'll show you what I'm planning on doing with this in a future post.

Once that job was out of the way, I went to inspect the henhouse.  How could the mink get into my feathered fortress?  I closely surveyed the entire exterior.  And then... I found it.  There was a very small gap at the bottom of the door casing.  It is only an inch and a half wide by 1 1/2 inch tall.  That's more than enough room for a bloodthirsty mink.  They don't even eat the chicken.  It appears they suck the blood.  To fill this gap, I cut off a piece of 2x4 and nailed up the hole to prevent re-entry.

That night a contingent of hens that previously roosted in the hen house gathered in front of the rabbit hutches to roost where it's safe behind hardware cloth

They were exposed to a lot of violence.  I guess they've seen enough.  For that matter, I have, too.

Where Thieves Break in and Steal

Lay not up for yourselves treasures upon earth, where moth and rust doth corrupt, and where thieves break through and steal:  But lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust doth corrupt, and where thieves do not break through nor steal:  For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.  Matthew 6:19-21

Laying hens were the first animal that we acquired on our little homestead farm.  I can still remember the joy that our family experienced when the little chicks turned into pullets and at about 24 weeks, they laid their first eggs.  Beautiful brown eggs!  The kids picked them up out of the hay in the nesting boxes and took them inside and Tricia cooked up fresh breakfast.

Ever since, we've been hooked on chickens.  Our fledgling flock grew from just a few to around 60 birds.  Then some started going missing.  We talked about this in earlier posts.  I set traps and caught more possums than you could shake a stick at.  

I believe I posted about catching a raccoon, too.  Once I caught him, I figured that our troubles were over.  They were not.  Tricia would call me and say, "We lost another hen last night."  A few nights would pass and then I'd go out and find this:

I knew we had a battle on our hands.  Look at the spurs on this rooster.  This is a male protector.  He was fighting for his ladies and met a violent end.  The spurs are almost 3 inches long.  He was not a pushover.  If he died fighting, his adversary must be vicious.

The dwindling flock was nervous.  I spotted them huddled up by the side of the garden, mourning the loss of their friends, no doubt.  I had to end these massacres one way or another and help the hens.

It was one night last week when I walked to the barn with my .22 when I came face to face with the cold blooded killer.  I have a hobby of sorts that involves walking out to the hen house and barn with a head lamp and with  my rifle loaded with rat shot, I shoot scurrying rats off the rafters.  I'll shoot 1 or 2 each night.  I went into the hen house on this particular night and saw a brown critter with a fresh killed hen.  We looked at each other and it ran right at me.  I fired.  I know I hit it, but the creature is larger than a rat and the rat shot did not kill it like it kills rats.  The killer escaped.  

The killer was a mink!  Minks have become commonplace around rice fields and crawfish ponds.  They are a sneaky beast, to be sure.  Minks are in the mustelidae family.  These are mammals, including weasel, otters, badgers, and wolverines.  Nasty creatures.  It is no mistake that Scripture defines them as unclean animals:

These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind...  Leviticus 11:29

I figured perhaps the mink was injured and went off into the woods to die.  For a few nights all was well in the hen house.  I worked on patching up all the holes in the henhouse where the mink was getting in.  It was quiet.  Then I determined that we had been in the eye of the hurricane.  The thieving mink dug under the threshold, killed a hen and tried to pull it under.

I set trap after trap, baiting it with the entrails of their most recent kill.  In the morning the traps would be set off, with all the bait gone, but no varmint in the trap.  I had Houdini on my hands.

One night I did catch something, but it was our neighbor's cat.  I sat outside after dark for hours in the quiet night, for four and a half hours one night, two hours the next.  My eyes would get acclimated to the dark.  I watched rats scamper and cats prowling, but no mink in sight.  Perhaps they smelled me?  

I went out the next morning and found that they had moved the pile of rocks at the end of the henhouse and tunneled in, killing and pulling a hen through the hole, leaving a macabre trail of horror in their bloodlust.

I opened the door to the hen house and found a crime scene.  Seven dead birds.  The anger!  The sadness!  We counted up our flock.  We were down to 11 birds.  We started with more than 60!  Everyone around us is experiencing the same thing.  We sold 10 dozen fertilized eggs to a neighbor down the road.  He hatched them out.  They were almost at the age to start laying when the minks killed every last one of them.  

The hen house once full, now echoes with emptiness.  The remaining hens are stressed, nervous and unsure of their future.  They've seen a lot of violence.  If it is possible for birds to have PTSD, I would say they have it.

With a flock of only 11, we devised a plan for safekeeping.  We have a rabbit hutch that is made with hardware cloth.  A mink cannot get through holes that small.  Each night, we catch all the birds and lock them up in the rabbit hutch and release them in the morning.  We've had no losses in over a week.

I did something that I should have done from the start.  I had been praying for God to protect our flock, but I got more specific.  I prayed, "Lord, please kill the mink."  Well, here's the absolute truth.  The very next day, 500 feet from our henhouse on LA 26 that separates a wooded patch behind our house from a rice field, I spotted something in the road.  It was the remnants (I hope) of the mink, victim itself of a violent end.  It's probably not nice of me, but I smiled.  A broad grin, in fact.  This was poetic justice.

I figured that poetic justice just might inspire a poem, so here goes:

There once was a crafty, vile villain,

Who was swift to shed innocent blood,

Our hen's carcasses stacked up like cordwood,

While the mink lie in wait in the mud.

He plotted more killing, more bloodshed,

With delight he ratcheted my ire,

Across Highway 26 his feet ran to do evil once more,

And met a swift end with a tire.

What's the moral of this poem, you may wonder?

What does the story portend?

If you set out to do some violence,

You yourself will meet a violent end.

May there be peace once more in the hen house.  Peace to you, as well

Save Our Hens!

If you were following, we put 42 of our eggs on the incubator and 25 hatched out.  We have lost quite a few birds lately to predation.  Of the 25 that hatched, 5 of them did not make it.  The 20 that remain are doing well and are growing.  Odds tell you that of the 20, about half will be egg laying hens to replenish our flock.  and the other half will be made into gumbo, ha ha!

Ten hens doesn't quite replace what we've lost lately.  I think we've lost five alone in the last two weeks.  So on March 10th, I put another 42 fertilized (I hope) eggs on the incubator.  I think they are fertilized.  It is springtime and the roosters have been very... let's say romantically inclined out in the pasture.  We'll have more chicks hatching out on March 31st.  

So what is killing our hens?  I can't say for sure.  Something nocturnal.  All the deaths are at night.  We find the carcass in the morning.  The bird's carcass is intact, but the head is missing.  A neighbor stopped by today and told me he lost 30 of his hens to MINKS.  He told me that he through the headless chickens in a cage trap and the mink came back to eat the chicken and that's how he caught them.  I don't know what's killing ours, but I aim to stop it with a two-pronged attack.

First, since they are killing at night, we've begun locking up all our hens in the henhouse at dusk.  I worked on the hinges to a little side door so that it opens and shuts.  You can see the door in the photo below behind LuLu.  The hens go into the door each evening and we walk out there, check to see that none are out, and then we close the door up behind them.  Safe and secure for the night.  A mandated curfew, you might say.

I also set another cage trap in the woods behind the hen house.  Almost immediately I caught a possum.

He's got to go.

But the more I read about it, possums don't eat the head off of chickens.  That's more the calling card of raccoons and minks.  Those are harder to trap than the poor, hapless possum.  We've added another layer of defense.  Besides locking the hens up and setting traps, we're placing Belle, our Great Pyrenees dog, out by the barn every night to keep her eyes on things.

Chicken feed is expensive.  Eggs are expensive.  We can't afford to have predators take our hens.

A Mink Coat For Tricia?

A mink coat.  When I think of that, I think of wealth, luxury, affluence.  The other day I almost acquired a mink coat for Tricia.  Let me rewind and tell you the story.  The hens have been real nervous lately.  My wife theorized that something was terrorizing them.  A hawk?  An owl?  Possums?  I promptly set the trap and caught 3 possums in five days.  I thought the culprits were caught.  Good thing, because their numbers were diminishing.  We're missing a noticeable amount of hens.  But now, I thought I solved the problem.

However, on Thursday of last week, there were feathers all over the ground by the barn and the hens wouldn't even go out and eat when we fed them the hen scratch.  What in the world?  On Friday I got home and Russ had been out to the barn to collect the day's egg production.  As he was picking up eggs, he noticed a fracas in the pasture.

Or maybe not.  It appeared at first glance that a hen was taking a dust bath.  After looking more closely, SOMETHING had her.  Russ picked up a stick and ran out to rescue the hen.  He popped the predator but good, and it limped into the woods wounded.  Russ ran to the woods and caught up with the perpetrator and finished the job with a solid blow to the animal's head.

What was it?  A mink!

This vicious weasel-like creature is a little larger than a squirrel.  This one was reddish-brown in color with lighter markings on its tail and a white patch under its chin.

I was impressed that Russ was able to run after this hen-killer and catch it.  Russ was in the right place at the right time.  The mink was not!  His chicken-killin' days are done.  The hen gratefully was saved.  She was scared and visibly shaken, but she'll live to see another day, thanks to Russ.

Where there is one, there's bound to be more.  We will keep our eyes peeled for more mink mayhem.  For now, though, I think I have the beginnings of a mink coat for Tricia!

On second thought, it might be quite a while before we can kill another.  Tricia is petite, but I'd have to kill a bunch of these varmints to make a coat for her.  Perhaps I can skin the mink and make Tricia a fashionable mink fur lined mask for her to wear during the Covid craziness.  She'd be the talk of the town.  I'm gonna go out on a limb and say she'd never wear it.