Category: Farm/Country Living

Chicken Predators Return, For a While

Yipe! Starting a couple of weeks ago, something was killing my chickens, as many as five per night. This is not only heartbreaking, it’s the sort of thing that can leave you with no chickens at all in very short order.

The dead chickens were in various places, but always on the fenced pasture, or so I supposed. A strong predator like a bobcat can leap a fence with a dead chicken in its mouth, leaving nothing behind but a splash of feathers where the kill took place. Coyotes are much the same. Hawks and owls eat the chickens without moving them, and raccoons will go either way, sometimes dragging the dead chicken long distances, sometimes not moving them at all.

I searched the perimeter of the fence and found no obvious game trails leading onto my chicken pasture, which made me wonder if I didn’t have a problem with owls. I readjusted the electric fence to make sure there were no high or low spots where a raccoon could squeeze through. Making a truly raccoon-proof fence is difficult, because, unlike other animals, they have no fear and probe the fence for weak spots. I found one trail leading to where a chicken had been killed outside the fence. Otherwise, nothing.

Next, I pulled out my snares. I don’t like using snares except on a well-defined game trail that’s leading straight to my chickens, since I have no quarrel with critters that are leaving my chickens alone. I started with the one trail leading to a chicken kill, and put a couple more in likely spots. After several nights I had caught two raccoons, and the predation ceased.

I’d lost many more chickens than could possibly be eaten by two raccoons. This doesn’t mean that there were lots more chicken-eating predators: it means that the raccoons killed far more than they could eat. Nature is neither nice nor efficient!

I used to rely on the federal trapper for this sort of thing, but Benton County has become very stingy on supplying matching funds to the wildlife control program, and this has taken a toll on everyone’s livestock. So I learned how to do trapping myself. Snares are particularly easy to use, and if you do it right, cause no collateral damage. As I said, you want to find a trail that’s used exclusively by predators who are commuting to what they imagine is a 24-hour chicken buffet. I learned most of my techniques from the works of Hal Sullivan. His snaring book and video are unpretentious but good. I recommend that you buy both, and his snaring starter kit, if you have a predator problem. This is the sort of activity where you want to exercise due care from the start.

I don’t like snares very much, but it’s a lot better than having all your chickens killed. I’m responsible for the well-being of my chickens, while the predators are quite literally crossing the line to get at them: they have to brave an electric fence.

Staying up all night and shooting the predators is an option if you can manage it: I can’t pull all-nighters anymore. Some people have excellent luck with livestock guardian dogs, which intimidate predators. But fencing alone generally isn’t enough.

The Screwdriver and the Tree

Here’s something you don’t see every day. On my morning walk, I noticed that someone had driven a screwdriver deep into the trunk of a tree:

It’s about six feet off the ground. Pounding it in must have been mighty inconvenient.

What could the purpose be? If I pull the screwdriver out of the tree, do I become King of the Loggers?

I’m afraid to try!

Wrestling With Google Groups

[Update: the links actually work now!]

I invited all 4,400+ subscribers to my monthly poultry newsletter to join the Grass-Fed Eggs discussion group, and then the fun began.

It turns out that Google Groups will let you sign up without having a Google account, but if you do, you can’t change your subscription options. And the default subscription option is “send me every posting as a separate email message,” which — because the group has become lively — is too many email messages for most people.

And to add insult to injury, Google Groups managed to double-subscribe a lot of people under two different email addresses. How, I have no idea. People who were dual-subscribed could edit the options of only one of these, leaving the other one blasting them unwanted emails. Sigh.

This has pretty much blown over now.

In general, I think the problem revolves around bugs in the “invite new members” feature, and there are similar problems for people who subscribe via email rather than through the Google Groups Web site. If you use the Web site, you should have no problems.

So when you join the group, do yourself a favor and subscribe via the link, using the Google Groups Web interface, and not with the hokey email subscription mechanism. This requires that you have a Google account. If you use more than one email address, set the email options in your Google account to let Google know this, and you won’t have any trouble. And set your subscription to “Daily Email Digest.” It’s the best compromise for most people.

It turns out the Google Groups are notorious for being sadly neglected, as discussed in this article from Wired. I had decided to put my discussion forum on Google Groups because I was tired of the long, slow decline in quality in Yahoo Groups. Just goes to show.

The Heating Season is Upon Us

It’s been cold out for a few mornings in a row, so I’ve built fires in the wood stove.

We alternate between heating the house entirely with wood and heating it mostly with wood. We have access to free wood from the neighboring Starker Forest (one of the many elements of their good-neighbor policy), so wood heat is especially attractive for us.

If cheap cordwood isn’t an option, sometimes you can find very inexpensive scrap wood. Nail-free scraps, such as you get from a pallet factory, are better than construction or demolition scraps. We used to get pallet scraps for $60 a cord. These were bone-dry and were really useful if our cordwood wasn’t well-aged.

One thing I’ve learned in my research is that starting fires in wood stoves is a lot easier if you use some cardboard along with the newspaper and kindling. Turns the whole thing from an iffy proposition into a slam-dunk. I learned this from this extension publication. Your tax dollars at work.

How To Build a Better Brooder House

We have one nice brooder house (the milk house next to our old dairy barn) and two horrible old ones that are supposed to be pasture houses, but were pressed into service more or less at random.

We’re replacing the two horrible old houses with one big new one, building it on a pair of concrete slabs that have been here for decades (which, oddly, touch each other but are not at the same level.) Here are a couple of pictures of the brooder house under construction:

You can see the horrible old brooder houses in the background of the second picture.

Features of interest:

  • We’re using three courses of concrete blocks to make the house rat-proof and rot-proof, even with more than a foot of deep litter on the floor. This is essential. Not that we have a rat problem all the time, but even “once in a while” is way too often.
  • We found a four-foot-wide exterior door, which makes it easier to get a wheelbarrow into the place.
  • The three windows wouldn’t provide anywhere near enough ventilation for a henhouse, but this is used solely as a brooder house, with the chicks removed to pasture houses once they no longer need heat. Smaller openings are adequate. (See Fresh-Air Poultry Houses for a complete treatment of this topic.
  • A brooder house can be designed so it can be used later as a shed or studio or whatever kind of outbuilding strikes your fancy. In this case, the two-level floor would be a bit of a nuisance, but that could be fixed with more concrete.
  • It’s as close to our house as we can reasonably make it. It’s good to be able to hear a commotion in the brooder house without going all the way out to the back forty.
  • We’ll be insulating the roof. This isn’t strictly necessary in a well-ventilated brooder house, but is a nice touch.

[Here’s a brooder house update, showing the house in a nearly-finished state and giving some more helpful hints.]