Seriously, you never know what is out there at night. I used to check the chickens late at night when i was awake. I wore a head lamp, and carried a shot gun and a .38 special because you just never know. Fischers are similar to weasels only bigger cousins i would say. They are very ravenous and i hope they never make it into your coop! Yeah, moat, search lights, guard dogs and maybe an AK 47 are indicated!Leslielbk, That is exactly what I thought when I started to see these bite marks and bent links. It's scary to think that something that can do this to a metal fence is roaming around our yard at night. Thankfully, we have not seen any new damage the last two days/nights. We've been setting the raccoon trap every night with no new takers to the bait, and I actually placed a bunch of old-fashioned mouse traps around the brick edging (the kind that snap when triggered) in the hopes of at least scaring it off if it steps anywhere on the bricks. So far, none of the traps have been tripped either. I did call animal control today, but they told me to set the trap another night using cat food as bait, and if it doesn't catch anything, they will come out on Wednesday to set a "larger, heavy-duty" trap for us. The man I spoke with stated that they have been catching "fishers" around here that can bite/bend and slip through chain linked fencing. I didn't even know we had fishers around this area either.Good grief, we already built a fortress, but if I had known about all the varmits around here before getting chickens, I might have considered a moat and added some crocodiles under a draw bridge to access the coop.
