Long-Tailed Weasel giving me problems.

[Razadia]

A weasel keeps getting into my RIR coop and eating eggs. A few months back (at around 1:30 in the morning) it tried to carry off one of my young birds from the same coop. Luckily, I was awake and on the back porch when it happened. I had enough time to grab a light and go see what was up. I ran the weasel off, put the bird on the roost and woke my dad up to let him know what had happened.My SIL owns 2 ferrets and that was the first thing that came to mind. My dad said it was a weasel and that he hadn't seen one in the area for years (though they certainly never left), but didn't doubt that they had stuck around. We haven't had a problem with weasels in the 10 years that we've owned game chickens, but for some reason it decided to show up now.

Does anyone have any ideas on how I can repel it until we can more fencing to keep it from getting in? I plan on trapping it as my SIL has decided that it looks too much like her ferrets and she would prefer I didn't kill it. It hasn't killed any birds yet, so I don't see a need to. I do the same with snakes. If it kills a bird, it dies for the safety of the others. If it doesn't, we remove it from the area.

 

[sourland]

If it is indeed a weasel, it's only a matter of time before it kills a bird.

 

[centrarchid]

Can you tie a dog out by coop. Dog need not get to weasel to make it hunt elsewhere.

 

[Razadia]

We have a dog tied out near the coop, but the weasel is being very persistent and has found a way around him. We currently only have a welded wire fence around the coop and it slips right through. With the cost of feed going up we haven't been able to afford small guage wire, but a friend of ours is tearing down their old pen and giving us the good chicken wire. It's not really costing us much since my mom's buyers haven't asked for any eggs lately, but I need to do something about it before it does manage to get a bird. We currently only have 1 1/2 + year birds in the pen. After it tried to get one of our pullets we moved them back into the cages and all our young birds are in cages with small guage wire to keep the preds out. It's worked so far, but I'm tired of taking chances. As soon as my cousin gets back in state (tomorrow or the day after) I'm going to see if he still has his small trap.

 

[centrarchid]

Trapping can work. Chicken wire will not work but hardware cloth will. Could you raise coop above ground to above 3 feet. Weasels are not prone to climb. I seldom loose my games to ground hunters like weasels once they start roosting up.

My dog runs loose and brings weasel / mink / skunk carcasses into house. Yum yum.

 

[Razadia]

Good to know on the chicken wire. I think I said this already, but we've had our games for about 10 years now and never had a weasel problem. This has only started in the past 6 months.

 

[centrarchid]

Good to know on the chicken wire. I think I said this already, but we've had our games for about 10 years now and never had a weasel problem. This has only started in the past 6 months.

I have had games much longer but messed with weasels only a couple times where they had chance to cause losses. Dogs pretty much eliminated weasel concerns. I did not have enough expereince with weasels to get a real handle on what was going on but with really wet and dry years the critters move about since they seem to do most hunting close to water / streams at least up here.

 

[Razadia]

We have a well and the ground just behind the house is still really wet from a water leak we fixed. The RIR coop is about 15 to 20 feet behind the house and the well is about the same distance from the coop. That would most likely be one of the reasons it's sticking around. The drought has done nothing to dry up where the leak was and there's a tree over that end of the house to make the ground drying even slower.

I've only seen the one weasel so far, so I'm really hoping that trapping it with solve the problem.

 

[Chesterchook]

i'll bet the chickens are terrified

 

[Razadia]

I know the pullet that was being dragged by her feathers was. She's the only reason I know we have a weasel problem. The older chickens don't really care, they just stay on their roost.

One thing I did forget to mention is that I've been keeping up with the eggs a lot better in an effort to make it leave. It doesn't seem to be doing much good as I saw tracks outside of the pen this morning.