Adventures of city homestead life

We have a raccoon living under our house.  We hear him walking around on the heating ducts each night and none of us want to go down to confront him.  He has never caused trouble.  Not even a big mess in our garden shed, until last week.  Last week during a very nasty wind storm, he decided the broken screen door on our chicken coop was an open invitation for a dinner buffet.  We were heartbroken in the morning, having NEVER had raccoons be an issue to our bitties at all.  We have even had them under the house before and they have just ignored the chickens entirely.  Not this time.  Traumatized by finding two dead and having to put down another due to amazing and gruesome injuries, we have gotten the rude reality that our ‘city coons’ now know exactly what chickens are and they know they are tasty!

This unwelcome guest has to go for good.  We asked our neighbors to use their live trap to catch the little sucker and looked up what was best to bait a trap with.  Each and every site I read said ‘cat food’.  So we hid the trap near the chicken coop and placed some cat food near the back of it. 

This morning we woke up and we had caught something!  But not a raccoon.

 

Poor Samson!  He was pretty upset.  But wow… we got a good laugh in the wake of our tragedy.

This afternoon when we got home from church we had caught something!  But again, not a raccoon.

Silly birds.  Sigh.  So I think we will have to be a little bit more aggressive and focused. 

As for right now, we have fortified the chicken coop with a light and a LOT of chicken wire.  That should keep the raccoon out of there until we can build the new one next month and keep our remaining birds safe.