Small-time-newbie-chicken-lover in South Africa

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Earth Rebel

Earth Rebel

Hatching
Oct 22, 2016
2
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9
South Africa
Hi!

Living on a farm in the Swartland. Raising chickens, ducks, geese, dogs, cats, and kids :) Mongoose issues, which got me to this site. Looking forward to sharing ideas and experiences with other chicken lovers <3
 
Hi and welcome to BYC! Thanks for joining us!
smile.png
 
Welcome to Backyard chickens. Mongoose aren't a predator to most of us, so I don't think our predator thread would have any suggestions. I think you would do best getting advice from the S.A. thread BYC ERS.
 
Hi and welcome to BYC - glad that you have joined us. I've only ever know mongoose to eat eggs and try to attack chicks - the adults, they seem to leave alone. Having said that, it seems that we only have a lone mongoose that visits our place, so i am not sure how their dining choices would change if they were acting as a group.

Cheers
CT
 
I have not been on the site for a while but my mongoose issue brought me back today as well. I live in Hawaii and have an unrelenting mongoose problem. I thought I would share some things that have helped me prevent egg theft. It also brings me no joy to admit I trap and kill every mongoose I catch. I have been dealing with this problem so long I no longer have any qualms about doing them in.

To start, I have tried everything to mongoose proof my run. They are ridiculously smart and persistent, unless you use some sort of sheet metal with no gaps they will find their way thru the smallest gap or dig or climb. I have barricaded every square inch of my run over a dozen times and they still find a way. The thing that has helped dramatically is I blocked off access to the nesting boxes from inside the coop and made them only accessible from the outside with a perch made out of a 2x6 the girls jump on from outside the coop. That stopped the egg theft until the mongoose found a gap from inside the coop and squirmed into the boxes that way during the day and ate the eggs in the coop, all I found were shells. I blocked that off and so far all has been good, but they will never stop trying. Eventually they will find a way in from the outside which brings me to my 2 year long battle with these crafty thieves.

2 years ago I would have never considered killing them, I just kept trapping and releasing one after the other after the other.... and so on. I have a favorite hen who lets herself in and out of the run whenever she pleases runs around the yard, gardens with me... waits for worms, sits in my chair with me, squawks at the door for me to give her treats in the morning and will actually sit on my shoulder like a pirate's chicken. She is adorable. She was out in the yard one day taking a dust bath about 20 feet from me and I heard her squawk and jump 5 feet in the air and run toward me just as I saw a mongoose run away from where she was and jump back out of my yard thru my pasture fencing. At that point I thought about how furious I would be if one of these little thieving, worthless monsters killed one of my chickens and she is a quite petite EE and luckily escaped the attempted attack.

It was that moment I said "forget this!" and set out to kill every one I caught, much to my horror there was an entire family hoard of them living behind my run in the bushes surviving on stolen eggs (this was before I theft proof my nest boxes). They had an area where they went to eat the eggs and it was just a massive spread of egg shells everywhere. The truth is they breed rapidly and they teach their offspring how to steal eggs and then those teach their offspring and so on it goes... I wiped out that batch and from then on it never stopped at the slowest point of mongoose activity I catch 2 per week at the height of mongoose activity I catch 2 a day. So to make a long story longer you can try and try to "mongoose proof" your boxes, your coop and your run but they will never stop trying and they will find a way in. I could not even hazard a guess as to how many I have caught because the number is so high. If you don't want to kill them I would suggest the nesting box idea I mentioned above but that won't protect your chickens from a possible attack, which in my experience is very rare but still a threat especially with smaller chickens.

If you do decide to rid yourself of them one by one then go and get one of those small animal traps that have a lever inside they step on, the slams the door and traps them inside. Bait it with a half or less of a hard boiled egg (this will prevent you from catching stray cats and such) put the egg in a plastic cup all the way in the back of the cage (If you just put the egg in they will eat at it thru the bars on the outside, they are incredibly smart) once you catch one fill up a trash can or large storage container or whatever you can find that will fit the entire cage and drown them. Dispose of the carcass and re-bait. Keep it somewhere preferably the chickens can't get to, I have never caught one of my own chickens but it could happen I guess. I keep three traps baited and ready at key areas around my run. I let them out of the run every day for a few hours and they are never too interested in them.
 

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