With our first lot of chickens, we had a ferret attack. In the space of a week, we went from having 15 hens to having 3. We had been losing one a night and I'd seen a ferret so we went out and bought a ferret trap.
The trap is a live capture trap, with a ramp on a pivot so that once the ferret is past halfway, the ramp tilts and a pin drops down to keep it tilted that way and the ferret (or whatever else you might have caught) can't get back out. Then depending on what you've caught, you can release it or destroy it.
On the day we bought it, Hubby came home a little after dark. As he came into the house, he heard a lot of noise coming from the chickens, as it was dark, this was unusual. We got a torch and went looking for the source of the racket.
The chookhouse was empty. Not a single hen in sight. We wandered all around the places that they sometimes spent time. We found a few sites where there were a lot of feathers in a circle - kind of suggesting a point of impact, but no chickens were visible alive or dead.
I asked Hubby where he thought the noise had come from. He wasn't sure but thought it had possibly come from the paddock beside the house. We stopped and looked and listened. I thought I could hear a wet chewing or eating sound, but I wasn't sure whether I'd heard it or it was the power of suggestion. We had a look in that paddock and found a few hens (alive) nesting in long grass, then as I shone the torch around, eyes reflected back at me. I didn't think they were from either of the cats we had at the time. We got closer and saw it was a ferret. This ferret was completely unconcerned about us, it was dragging a hen across the paddock. Hubby went to get a weapon (a rake as it turned out) while I kept an eye on it. By the time he came back, this ferret had almost dragged it's prey over my feet.
He hit it several times with the side of the rake. It squeaked, bounced and kept running. It ran into the wood shed. We heard it chirrup and was answered by other chirrups. We had a female with babies then.
About ten minutes later it was back, trying to drag this hen further across the paddock. We went and got the trap, discussed and argued about how and where to set it. In the end, we put the dead chicken in a cardboard box, cut a hole out the side for the trap to sit in it and weighted the box down.
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| Entrance to trap with pin dropped to keep the ramp tilted. |
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| Other end of trap - with an occupant. |
Master (then) 14 stood on guard near the trap for about an hour and a half. He hit the ferret with the rake several times, it just kept bouncing, squeaking and running away. It became wary of him, so he came inside after a while.
In the morning, we found a ferret in the trap. We looked at each other and said "Now what?" We decided we'd drown it, but weren't sure if a drowning ferret would taint the water in the water trough, so Hubby went off to get a fish crate and start filling it with water. While he did that, Master 14 picked up the trap to have a look at the ferret and accidentally let it out. Fortunately, he was quick enough to put the trap down on the ferret's tail and hold it there. Um, crap. What now?
Hubby got the log splitter and smacked the ferret on the head with the blunt end. It took three decent blows before it stopped getting back up again. Those buggers are near to indestructible.
This ferret had gone into a frenzy and killed at least six other hens that night before getting caught.
In the five years since then, we had seen maybe one ferret.
Then a couple of months ago, I noticed Mrs Wolowitz, my old bantam hen was missing. There was one of those feather impact rings in her feathers in the hen house, but no sign of her. She'd been sitting on eggs, so for her to suddenly vanish wasn't good. Then over the next few days, I found at least one hen a day with it's throat torn out and mostly eaten.
I got a new rooster. I'd heard crowing in one of the sheds at work. It took some time, but we found a sneaky rooster that had managed to stay hidden with the girls for at least six months. I named him Remington partly after Remington Steele (sneaky spy type staying undercover - yes I know Remington Steele was a Private Investigator and not a spy) and partly because he was a shaver (see what I did there?). He fell to the ferret after about a week. When I found him, he was little more than skin and bones. I knew then that we had more than one - too much of him had been eaten for one ferret and there was at least one bird a day going.
I blocked up the gaps under the new chook house with bricks, fence posts and rocks leaving only a big enough space for the ferret trap.
There was a large female ferret in the trap the next day. A large male the day after, followed by two half sized ferrets over the next two days. I kept putting the trap back in the same spot. About a week later, there was another one.
About a month after this patch of ferrets, I lost three hens from the tunnelhouse in one night. Miss 11 and I were rounding up the remaining hens and taking them to the other chook run, when Miss 11 started squeaking "OMG MUM, look look it's a ferret!!" She pointed to the end of the tunnelhouse and there was a ferret, halfway through a hole in the netting, eating the organs out of one of the hens that had been killed the night before. I chased it off but it was back again quite quickly. When I took the next load of hens to the chook run, I brought the trap back with me and placed it so the entrance lined up with the hole in the netting. It didn't work, the ferret was able to nudge the trap out of the way and keep eating the hen - and it did so quite casually in front of us.
I chased it off again, I could see it running towards the old pig pen (currently unoccupied). It chirruped and was answered by other chirrups. Great, another family affair. I tried jamming the trap in tight so it couldn't be easily moved and carried on rounding up and taking the remaining (very spooked) hens to their new accommodation.
Before I left for the night, I noticed that the liver was still there in the chicken that had been partially eaten, so I dropped the liver into the trap and made sure the trap was firmly wedged in place.
The next morning I found the biggest ferret I've ever seen in the trap (see photo below - that's my foot not a childs). She was huge and heavy. I decided to put the trap back into the chook run. I figured it was better to be protecting the living hens rather than the dead ones.
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| This ferret was extremely heavy in the trap. |
I borrowed a cage trap from work and cut the legs off one of the dead chooks and set that trap in the tunnelhouse. I didn't set it right and so both legs were gone without tripping the trap but there was another ferret caught in the other trap.
I've lost several turkeys to ferrets during this time as well. I think these ferrets have to be very brave, very quick or very stupid to take on adult male turkeys - they scare the crap out of me, they're big and vicious, but I can't think of anything else that would rip the throat out of a turkey.
I've trapped and drowned 9 ferrets over the last couple of months. This week I've lost more hens and a turkey but haven't caught any new ferrets. I've blocked up the new gaps under the chook houses where the birds were half dragged under, there hasn't been any more deaths since I did that, but I haven't caught any more ferrets.
I have no idea why we suddenly have unprecedented numbers of ferrets, but I'm confident I've made a good dent in the local population.
