Today my next door neighbor heard one of his broody hens "raisin a ruckus". He thought he saw a cat scaring the heck out of 10 chicks & mother hen. So he ran into his house and grabbed a small caliber rifle and ran back to the pasture where the hen was screaming. He discovered a dark brown mink had a 5 week old chick in its mouth. He was able to destroy the mink and everyone was surprised to learn a mink was in our area. We soon discovered that the leader of the chicken pack was missing and the only remaining hen in his small flock that did not have a nest of eggs or a brood of chicks. It appears his only rooster and a single mature hen as well as the 5 week old chick were killed by the mink. This death and destruction by the mink took less than an hour this afternoon. Mink (any weasel) kill for sport. Skunks are generally too slow to do this kind of killing. They do try but are usually unsuccessful. If you have free range chickens in an area frequented by raccoons or any type of weasel ....... be very careful of the access to your flocks. My neighbor is fortunate that his rooster fathered 30 chicks this spring and that there are about 12 more eggs being brooded. So even with the losses ..... he'll have 45 chickens by mid-summer instead of the 8 that walked into his yard and set up house in February. To give you an idea of the cost in terms of chickens. He now has 4 mature chickens and just 2 months ago he had 8. This is a common cycle with poultry in regions where predators stalk flocks. In 4 months he's had 4 mature chickens die and a few chicks. My flock is fenced in and about 100 feet further from the stream but adjacent almost to the area that my neighbors hickens frequent (where the mink / weasel came from). I have lost chickens to marauding dogs and maybe a few to weasels or hawks. This is sad news today. The small flock is going to be pretty much invisible till the newly hatched chicks can walk about safely. This is the only instance we know of a mink in this area. I've been here 5 years and never seen or heard of one here. Kelly
Mink (weasels) can be trouble
Kelly, I have a hunch that some of the people who think cats or other animals have killed their chickens have minks to blame. They're notorious for killing chickens and if you leave the smallest opening, they'll get into your coop or pen.
My mother said the biggest animal problem her mother had on the farm with her chickens was keeping the minks out of the coop.
Hart, I trapped 25 feral cats last year on this property ..... so many I got tired of destroying them. I also trapped 25 skunks and I got even more tired of killing them. Combined these 2 varmints are certainly responsible for 95% of the losses to our poultry with feral cats taking 90% of the credit. Feral cats are the single worst problem that poultry farmers have to deal with ......perhaps several times worse than raccoons and weasels combined. We found the missing roo and his only single hen friend walking around this morning .... both are fine. When the broody hen let out the alert yesterday that her chick had been grabbed by the mink ... he and his hen friend high-tailed-it. I've lived here 5 years ... and this is the 1st mink I have ever seen or heard of in this region ever. We have killed 3 of the tiny little Ermine weasels (black tip on tail) in 5 years. It is clear ...... little weasels and big weasels share the same territories. We're 30 miles from timber or forested land ..... straight out into the desert. Mink in this area are extremely uncommon. In other parts of the USA mink & fisher & raccoons are likely a bigger problem but here in Central Washington ..... feral cats are a plague; especially for upland game birds and songbirds. Kelly
Kelly, there's no deserts for thousands of miles here. We are surrounded by a national forest. There are feral cats but I've never had them go near the chickens. They do like to hunt for mice and voles in the field across the road. There are minks, hawks, raccoons, foxes, skunks and snakes that you have to watch for. The worst problem I've had has been neighbors' dogs that are allowed to wander the neighborhood, though. That's the biggest reason my chickens are not ever going to be free ranging.
Hart, In this area the feral cats hunt roosting chickens in the winter and chicks in broods during the spring and summer. We have Red Tail Hawks and Prairie Falcon here but they have too much easy prey to bother hunting for chickens. I have a gripe with skunks because they raid the chicken, guinea, pheasant and quail nests. The feral cats are pure hell on the roosting quail and the pheasant populations in the winters. During the winter I'll see the remains (feather clumps) of a 4-5 quail every week in the snow or grass below my cedar trees where they roost. I have about 20-30 of them all winter long in my row of 8 overgrown Atlantic White Cedar trees west of the house by about 50 feet. As a boy I lived in Harrisonburg, Staunton & Charlottesville in 1975 for about 9 months. I like the valley there. Some of the roads were a bit circuitous. My cousins were attending VMI at the same time in Lexington. I was in Buena Vista for a few days visiting and stopped in to meet them briefly. My best friend from college is from near Salem and I have a roommate from Lynchburg (he owns a bookstore there). I'm from Seattle and they were raised near Washington, DC. I've seen them one other time in 50 years. We have no raccoons here and I was pretty much convinced we had no weasels worth worrying about until yesterday. I'm more convinced to deplete my flock of poultry (35 chickens + 5 ducks) now and switch to guinea fowl and the Game (pit fighting) Fowl. From what I see they are much like the chcikens from South Africa that roost 50 ft up in trees. Nothing like mother nature (selective breeding .... Darwin) to make one better able to cope with the environment. Kelly
I'm about an hour north of Harrisonburg. I grew up in the DC area too.
You all sure do have ferocious cats around there. The ones here are pretty timid but they're also probably not hungry enough to go after chickens. There are plenty of mice and voles for them to eat.
Hart, The truth is in the winter here .... the mice and voles are hibernating or underground and not really a menu option for cats. The feral cats get real hungry and bold. In the winter they hone their skills catching pheasant, quail and even our large fowl chickens. Last winter I trapped a feral cat that must have weighed in at more than 25 lbs. It felt like a Mountain Lion when I lifted it. My neighbor had 2 full grown roosters ..... a RIR and a Barred Rock. Each was close to 7-8 lbs. Both were in a 1/2 acre pasture without much of a chicken shed and both ended up statistics. The feral cats here are incredibly successful hunters. We had a colony of bob tailed cats .... kinda cute except they eat chickens. My trapping effort last year seems to have eliminated them. Kelly