After my skirmish with the ermine, strangely, my attitude towards him improved. His beauty had made an impression on me. I had been reluctantly resolved on trying to kill him before, but now I had a newfound determination to preserve not just my chickens’ lives, but this wild animal’s too.
I knew that we had lived in peace with the ermine republic (Erminia?) since we first got chickens ten years ago; we had seen the heads of a family of them poking out of a pile of old logs near the coop at the time. Typically, ermine focus their predation on rodents. Since we have no farm cat, their labours at controlling the local mice, vole, and chipmunk population—critters that cause problems in the garden and with stored chicken feed—are more than welcome. Our ermine had probably just followed rodent burrows into the grain-rich coop and, when he had finished them off, moved on to the chicken course. He had a useful part to play in the farm ecosystem, which he had strayed from, and I just had to put guardrails in place to guide this wayward soul back onto the righteous path.
I’m a sucker for Weather Network click-bait videos, and around this time this one popped up on my screen.
How cute is that? Surely I could learn to live in harmony with such a playful creature!
While before I had felt hopeless about making my coop ermine-proof, now I resolved to close off the half-dozen holes he had shown me that night, plus any new ones he cared to reveal in the coming nights. My strategy would be to continue heading out in the wee hours of the morning, hopefully intercepting his attacks, and gaining valuable intelligence about what further weaknesses my coop might possess.
I bought a ten foot roll of hardware cloth—with half-inch holes between the wire mesh that even an ermine couldn’t squeeze through—and used up much of it plugging the holes I knew existed in the coop. I was sure there would be others, but surely my new weasel buddy would kindly show me where my coop needed additional reinforcements.
One problem with my plan, I realized, was that I was risking further losses of chicken life, until I could locate and block off every hole. But I rationalized this by thinking of myself as a general and the hens as my troops. A good general must make the difficult decision to risk his troops in the prosecution of the war. My army may suffer a few more casualties, but each death would hopefully move us closer to the goal of a coop impenetrable to assault, and an end to this conflict. Erminia would then have no choice but to sue for peace.
(This warfare analogy falls short, I’m aware, in the fact that my chickens can’t actually inflict any losses on their ermine enemy. Even my rooster, who has been known, thanklessly, to launch sneak attacks on me from behind during the day, would just blithely watch the nightly weaselly carnage from his safe perch on the topmost roost, surrounded by a poultry shield of hens, who probably felt it the highest honour to sleep next to their king and buffer any ermicular assaults. My troops were nothing more than meek cannon fodder, who would turn the other cheek if they had them.)
I arose at my godforsaken hour for several more nights, trekking out to the henhouse. Once, near the coop, my peripheral vision caught sight of something, and I turned to watch a snowy owl noiselessly taking flight from a fencepost I had just passed.
But there was no sign of the ermine. There was nothing on the camera, either, which I had set up to send a photo to my phone whenever there was movement, and for my phone to ping when it did so. I slept with the phone next to me in bed, ready to leap up and into action at the first alarm. But no alarm came. Perhaps I had scared him off for good. My vigilance began to wane.
Then, one morning six days after my last encounter, I opened the coop and immediately saw the all-too-familiar sight of a lifeless chicken body. And then another. And another. In all, the ermine had slaughtered eight chickens in one night. This was no incremental casualty rate—this was a whole battalion wiped out in one maneuver, carnage littering the battlefield.
Weasels are known for this kind of “surplus killing”. Biologists believe some predators engage in it to take advantage of opportunities for killing when they present themselves, with the intention of cacheing the meat for later consumption. But even with ermines’ need to eat up to a third of their body weight per night (the equivalent of me eating 50 pounds of meat), this was beyond excessive.
Having developed a more personal relationship with this particular weasel, I saw this as more than instinctual. I saw this as a message. The ermine was saying to me, “You think you can scare me off? I’m just going to wait you out, and then strike back even harder. You can’t win.”
I had now lost about 30 hens to this one little animal. I had lost another 20 of my original 100 to other predators the summer before. My chicken army was now whittled down to half strength. I had ordered reinforcements to arrive in early April, but I didn’t want them to step into this bloody fight to the death. I had to somehow win this battle before then. There would be no peaceful co-existence. This was total war.
I loaded the more deadly pointy pellets into my gun, set up a second camera, and redoubled my trapping efforts. By this point, I had figured out where his lair likely was, following his tracks in the snow (he would leap several feet at a time) back to a pile of telephone pole sized logs that predated our purchase of the farm. I set up three traps at what looked like doorways into this bunker, making it difficult for him to exit it without running right into one of them. Other traps lurked both inside and around the coop.
If I ever felt a twinge of guilt over my new murderous instinct towards this animal, I told myself that taking the life of the ermine was about saving the lives of the chickens. While I do believe that the life of one wild animal is in a sense more valuable than the life of a domestic chicken (given that there are over 26 billion chickens in the world, while many wild species are in decline), was this ermine worth 30 chickens? I’m sure my chickens wouldn’t think so.
Based on how the chickens’ bedding had been disturbed, I surmised that the deadly raid had been launched from a tunnel underneath one row of nestboxes (remember that first photo of him peering out from them?). I ripped out the nextboxes and used up the rest of my hardware cloth fortifying every opening I could find.
A few evenings later, shortly after darkness had fallen, I went out to the coop just to fill up their water. When I opened the door, I saw that one chicken had already been slain. I tried to sleuth where the beast had gotten in this time, and saw that an ermine-sized hole had been dug in the bedding at the base of a closet I use for storing straw. Then I saw a head poke out from this new hole. We meet again! And once again, I was unarmed! My warrior instincts are obviously not very well developed.
I chased him away—he didn’t make repeated attempts at incursion this time—and plugged up the hole as best I could with a rock. Then I carted away the dead body, and went to bed.
The next morning, there was another dead chicken—a number that felt mercifully small at this point. I couldn’t tell how he had gotten back in.
Grasping for new tactics, I carried the latest victim to the suspected entrance of the ermine’s lair, and left the body there, like a ritual sacrifice. Maybe, I thought, if he could actually drag one of his prey back to his lair to munch on later, he wouldn’t feel the need to kill any more of my chickens, at least for a little while. “If you’re going to kill my chickens,” I said to the gaping blackness of his den, “at least finish your meal.”
The next day, I noticed that the chicken was gone. Had he dragged it into the bowels of his refuge for a feast? Would this buy some peace in the henhouse?
A day passed. Then a few. Then a week. No sightings, no pictures, no tracks, and, most importantly, no dead chickens.
It took me a long time before I let my guard down. After several weeks without a sign, I finally dared to believe that the nightmare was over. Somehow, miraculously, the beast had vanished.
But how? I wasn’t so naive as to believe that the chicken corpse I had laid at the ermine’s doorstep had been accepted as some kind of peace offering and had assuaged the beast’s voracity permanently. Maybe the dead chicken had drawn some other predator to the ermine’s hide-out and flushed him out. Maybe that snowy owl, multitudes more patient than I, had stood watch over the field until the ermine came leaping across it, intent on another night of gleeful havoc in the henhouse, and this silent feathered hunter had taken his furry quarry. His fate is a mystery swallowed up by the night. I only knew that he was gone, like winter fading away into spring, and the chicken survivors could live to enjoy another summer.
Postscript
As a storyteller, this isn’t the end I might have hoped for. I dreamed of a triumphant victory over this ermine, where my heroic efforts vanquished the enemy. As I lived it, I was acutely aware that I was in a story, because I knew I would be writing about it. It was a strange feeling waking up each morning, and wondering how this story, in which I am a primary character, would unfold. In reality, all our lives are like this—stories unfolding with oftentimes unpredictable plot twists. Given the uncertainty of life, it’s remarkable that we can face each day with relative calm. Maybe it’s only because we hide from the fact that we are the protagonists in our own tales that we are able to meet the day with a degree of equanimity. But there is also a certain excitement that can come from seeing your life in this way, even if real life doesn’t often offer storybook endings.
The chapter called “The War with Erminia” has closed. But there will be many stories more.
If you missed them, you can read Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.
Lovely Sean. Your struggle between respect, disdain, anger, admiration -- and the multiple lenses through which you see and engage with the natural world (farmer, ecologist, etc.) -- are so vivid, as is the character of our little fri/enemy. I particularly like the post-script. I was wondering if you were aware, at the time, of being in the midst of the story you were experiencing and that you would write about ... Indeed, the protagonists of our own stories, if only we are so aware. (Occassionally, when at a cross-roads, I imagine myself to be an author and ask myself, what would I want for this protagonist...lol....but only occasionally.) Well done!!
My money's on the snowy owl. I think you owe him big time...