Daytime predator???!!!

[chicknmania]

PS: Babygirls, I am sorry for your loss too. It is just so horrible and exhausting trying to deal with these predator guys; I feel like we're fighting a war.

 

[chicknmania]

OK, we found out what it is. It's skunks. One killed one of our hens in the nestbox at 8:30 in the morning yesterday while I was probably twenty feet away outside the barn. I heard them rioting but stuck my head in and they stopped, so I didn't investigate; figured they were just hungry as they hadn't had breakfast yet, or it was the "help, I laid an egg" ritual the hens do. My son found the dead hen when he went in an hour later to feed them; she was mostly eaten and lying in the nest box. He picked up the nest box to get her out and two skunks were lying underneath it. They dashed down a tunnel they had dug behind the nestboxes. Last night we found where they had come in and barricaded the holes by laying sheet metal over the hole and wedging it under the barn, then weighting everything down. Last night the skunks actually bent a corner of the sheet metal back, so that they could access one of the tunnels. They could not manage to accesss the other one they dug. This had to have been a big effort for them. When my son went to feed this am, they dashed down another (old) tunnel we thought we had barricaded well enough before.They did not kill anything this morning. We are not looking forward to setting traps for skunks, but it doesn't look like there's much alternative. Stands to reason since they're related to minks and weasels, so the way they eat them (innards only) would be about the same,.