Dangerous Times

Living in the woods, we knew we may have a lot of wildlife running around.  We actually saw far less than we thought we would.  I am not sure if it is because the year we moved here was a really dry year in the way of precipitation and animals moved on or what.  The past few months we have been seeing more rabbits and squirrels, less birds...but that may have to do with the scare tape I have on the fencing...and less deer.  It is not that they aren't around, we see tracks and other signs of animals when we go for walks.  We have had Canadian Geese land on our pond and spend days...our geese talk to them but can't see them when they land, as do cranes of some sort.  We know we have raccoons around and that they like eating turtles.  We have had packs of coyotes run through our yard in the middle of the night, and we were told that there was a fox den up on the shooting range.  We also have Hawks that circle overhead at times, the geese keep a close eye on them and if they get to close, they honk loudly and put their wings out from their bodies trying to look even larger than they are.

I bring these things up as we still don't know exactly what has killed four of our chickens and one of our ducks.  We had no deaths from predators up until now.  The first 4 of our poultry were missing their heads and necks, one was dragged to a corner of the fence in it's pen and whatever it is...grabbed it's wing and attempted to pull it through the fence...this was a full grown rooster in a completly fenced in pen.  We have set a trap and had it set for the past two weeks, we have caught nothing in the trap.  We have a game camera set up and it has infrared and a pretty good range on it, and we have seen nothing in the pictures, other than ourselves and our dogs.  The last rooster that was killed, I thought we had our proof...but when I pulled the card to view them, the batteries had run out two days prior...it pissed me off that the batteries only lasted 4 days!  I inspected the dead rooster trying to see If I could figure it out, it was killed in the same pen as the one before it, killed in one area and there was a lot of damage to this one, there were three piles of feathers this time and a lot of the feathers had small chunks of meat still on them.  I had to pull the body from the fence to see the damage, not only was it's head and neck missing this time, but a whole wing and all of the breast too.  The remaining wing was hanging on by a thread of tendon.  Among the feathers, I found bones striped clean and scattered through the main pile of feathers, it looked almost like they had been cut.  I didn't notice any obvious tracks, but I was thinking I was looking for raccoon tracks.

I have been doing my best to get all of my chickens, ducks and geese put into their houses at night.  The roosters sometimes have different ideas.  They will fly to the top of the big coop...it is about 8 feet high at the back, when I try to get the rest put up sometimes the ones on the roof fly to the branches of a tree by the rooster coop and roost for the night 15 to 20 feet off the ground.  I refuse to climb a tree and try to wrangle a rooster while on a ladder, I would probably end up breaking a bone.  The roosters who spend the night in the tree sometimes get lucky...sometimes they die.  I have kept them in the coop for the past few days to protect them.   My husband went and looked at the destruction and tried to figure out what is killing them, he saw tracks I did not see...talon marks and prints.  That night when I put up all of the poultry, I heard an owl for the first time since we have been out here.  I am not sure if the owl is killing the chickens, because it puzzles me that two of the carcasses were partially pulled through the fence in the same exact spot.  If it is an owl, does it try and carry them and maybe the 7 pound rooster is too heavy, hits the fence and then it try's to grab it through the fence?  I am not sure...I hope we find out soon, my rooster population is going down fast and these that have been killed are earmarked for the freezer.

If I truely want to find out what it is, it will require the sacrifice of another rooster.  I have been thinking about it, but I can't do that on purpose...I am just not wired that way.  I never thought in a million years that I would become a CSI...Crime Scene Investigator...for poultry.