Predator News

We found a couple of additional game trails with telltale feathers here and there, showing that chickens had been taken that way by predators, and we set some more snares. So far we’ve caught a large raccoon in addition to the previously reported bobcat, and predation seems to be down.

I should mention that I learned predator control partly from the local Federal trapper (courtesy of the USDA-APHIS Wildlife Damage Program), partly from the instructional DVD that came with the Dakotaline Snare Package I bought to get myself started with my own snaring, and partly from Hal Sullivan’s excellent book, Snaring 2000

The latter two products get you up and running very quickly and easily. Catching predators with snares is easier and far more targeted than I thought. This is partly due to changes in snaring technology that have taken place over the past 20 years or so, and partly due to the fact that game trails are laughably easy to identify. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that a game trail with chicken feathers on it, that heads straight onto my chicken pasture (through the electric fence), is not the work of an innocent creature.

I only recently started using snares. I used to rely on the Federal trapper. Unfortunately, the Wildlife Damage Service relies on matching funds from the county, and Benton County (in spite of being the home of an agricultural college) is run by clueless city slickers who think that all wildlife is cute and cuddly. Their understanding of rural issues is still at the Little Golden Book level.

In general, if you have a farm, you want to live in a rural county, where county government is run by farmers, since they know what’s what in the country. Ideally, you would be in a rural county that’s adjacent to an urban one, thus giving you a city market without having to put up with city cluelessness.

Rabbit Resurrection

My 1975 VW Rabbit came home rejuvenated from the shop today. (As I wrote in an earlier post, restoring my 33-year-old Rabbit, which has been in my family since it was new, is the method I’ve chosen for achieving better gas mileage). Its main problem was that it had about a half-inch of rusty sludge in the bottom of the gas tank. This (and the underlying problem of water finding its way into the gas tank) had caused a variety of problems. The good people at the Independent Auto Werks in Corvallis cleaned the tank, blew out the fuel lines, did a partial rebuild of the carburetor (including replacing a clogged idle jet — no wonder it didn’t want to run!), and now the car is running better than it has in years, maybe decades.

An old Rabbit handles like an old-fashioned British sports car — stiff suspension, responsive steering, with a little engine but also very lightweight. They’re fun to drive but can carry a lot of stuff, though I’d take something bigger if I were making a special trip to the feed mill.

In a while I’ll take it down to the body shop run by one of my neighbors (G&R Body Shop in Philomath, Oregon) and see what it will take to get it prepped and painted.

So far, this project looks to be a lot cheaper and more fun than getting a newer subcompact economy car, and the gas mileage ought to be about the same as a new one. (Actually, this old Rabbit gets about 30 MPG, while a brand-new one only gets about 25 MPG). And it amuses me that the car I learned to drive on has gone from “new car” to “used car,” “old car,” “piece of junk,” and “collectible classic.”


Scratch One Bobcat

I found a bobcat in one of my snares yesterday, which was Day Three of having snares out. It was a big male — 26 pounds. Most my chicken losses are consistent with how bobcats hunt (dawn or dusk, with a short chase, a quick kill, and the chicken carried away without being dragged), but I think I’m losing chickens faster than can be explained by a single bobcat, however big, so I’ll keep up my anti-predator efforts.

My flock size and egg output are down to shockingly low levels, thanks to large numbers of hens vanishing without a trace. I only had 13 dozen to take to the Farmer’s Market on Saturday, where a few weeks ago I was routinely selling over 50 dozen even on a slow day.

The stealthiness of the local predators probably means that I can’t rely on the electric fence as my only permanent anti-predator measure — I have to do more.

Rural Trade-Offs

Living in the country requires trade-offs, and so does farming. Taking vacations in February instead of August, for example.

Sometimes the trade-offs seem like a good deal. Corvallis has an excellent fireworks display every Fourth of July, but we are so far north that the city waits until it’s fully dark at about 10:15 PM before starting the display. After it’s done, there’s a brief traffic jam and then (if you’re me) a half-hour drive home.

I decided a while back to never drive if it’s past my bedtime. It’s way too dangerous. So we spend the night in Corvallis at the Super 8 motel. The odd-numbered rooms on the third floor have a wonderful view of the fireworks. So much for late-night driving!

An added bonus is that the Riverfront Park in front of the motel is swarmed by holiday-goers who set off their store-bought fireworks while waiting for the Main Event. It’s a madhouse, but in a good way. My kids like joining in.

Our fourteen-year-old, Karl, who is autistic, found the flash and bang a little overwhelming (even with a set of hearing protectors on), and was greatly delighted to be able to retreat into the motel room, where he could still see and hear everything.

(If you have an autistic kid who hasn’t tried hearing protectors (Karl likes the standard 3M over-the-ear kind), give it a whirl. Karl can enjoy environments he found overpowering before.)

This year, with the Fourth of July on a Friday, we loaded the van with all our Farmer’s Market stuff so we’d be ready for the market the next morning. In fact, the motel is only two blocks away from the market.

Not too many years ago, I wouldn’t have sprung for a motel room, on the grounds of misplaced macho. It’s better to focus on what’s going to provide the best outing, and to cut oneself some slack into the bargain.

Didn’t there used to be more hens around here?

I recently fell into the free-range chicken farmer’s nightmare: missing hens. A few scatterings of feathers where hens had been nabbed, but obviously a lot more hens are missing than that.

Couldn’t happen at a worse time — during the upswing of the farmer’s market season. Demand for free-range eggs is increasing and I have a sharply reduced supply of hens, and therefore eggs.

I’m rounding up the usual suspects: tightening up the electric fence, finishing up the field mowing so there’s less cover for predators, setting snares on the obvious predator trails into the woods, asking around if anyone has some spare hens or started pullets to sell, ordering more chicks, and giving pep talks to the hens to lay six eggs each every day until the crisis is resolved. Except for the snares, all of this amounts to closing the barn door after then horses have escaped.

I figure it has to be bobcats again. The fact that there’s no chicken blood or body parts on the field seems to mean that the hens were nabbed and then carried off bodily (not eaten on the spot or dragged). This requires that the predator jump the electric fence while carrying a chicken. It takes a pretty big predator to do this (even with fences as low as mine) — bobcats, coyotes, or possibly cougars, or maybe even humans. But the M.O. is just the same as my last bobcat outbreak.

In the past, snares have worked wonderfully against bobcats. If you set ’em right, you get the miscreants and nothing else. The thing is, most bobcats aren’t chicken thieves, but the ones that are will kill every one of your chickens unless stopped. So it’s best to declare war only one the bad boys. The fly in the ointment is that the bobcats are so stealthy that you can be in big trouble before you realize that you have a problem at all. You can’t catch a predator with a snare you haven’t set.

What I’m supposed to do, in order to prevent disaster when Mother Nature deals from the bottom of the deck, is to start a new batch of pullets every couple of months, so there’s a steady stream of replacement hens. There’s a fairly brisk demand for pullets in my area, so I can start way more than I need and still come out ahead.