My mom was walking around in the front yard talking on the phone, with a fly swatter in her hand. She looks up all the sudden and sees all the peachicks all in the air flying every direction and then she sees the bobcat in the flowerbed with one of my peahens in his mouth!! She rushes over and trys to swat him w/ the fly swatter, but he sees her and takes off over the fence. After this happens mom calls me outside and she is holding the hurt peahen. She has blood gushing out of her mouth, and her stomach is all bloody from where the cat had her in his mouth, and she has her mouth open gasping for air. I'm so upset by this time (who wouldn't be). Here I am holding one of my peachicks that is dying, I have my nice skirt on and I have blood running all over my hands. I'm glad we didn't have anyone drive up..it would have looked like I'd just killed somebody!
The poor thing died, there is no way she could have lived. After she died she started having spasms; she was flopping around on the ground and kicking her feet, I had a hard time not bursting into tears at this point.
Anyway, after that I'm like where the heck are the other peachicks?
I start searching around and we found the white peachick over with Ms. Fluffy, Sophie, and the Coronation hen. We find one of the peacocks over by the Quail House...he'd flown over the car port and onto the Quail House roof.
Then we finally found the other peacock and peahen on the roof..after about 40 minutes they finally come down and I'm able to lock them up.
*sigh* What an afternoon...
We baited the trap in the front yard with the deceased peahen, and hopefully in the morning we will have a bobcat! Please Pray that we do!!
We went hunting for'em, but we only found some tracks.
Tomorrow evening we have another homeschool family coming over to pickup some of my Bantams (hopefully all of them). I gotta go catch the chickens off the roost now.
I hope you catch that bobcat! I love felines, but a wild thing that will come into your yard, in daylight, with a person walking around talking, is dangerous! If they'd come at night to catch mice and rats and possums and the other wild things that harm your flock and ruin your feed, it would be different. Something has to be terribly wrong for the bobcat to do what he did.
Oh Aspen, how awful! I am sorry about your peahen! Hopefully you will get that predator and turn it into a good predator. Here's to a better day tomorrow ! Deb