I shouldn’t have been surprised that the big coop’s defenses were soon breached. It was even more Swiss cheese-like than the small coop, with just an earthen floor, and walls that had sagged and buckled outwards over the decades. Finding the small coop bereft of chicken nuggets, the as-yet-unseen weasel simply scampered 100 feet over to the big coop for his main course. Imagine his delight at finding not just a handful of feathery morsels, but row upon row of them lined up on roosts like a shish kabob. He must have felt like his ermine brothers and sisters who, in an all too typical bit of 19th century colonial stupidity, were introduced to New Zealand in order to control the rabbit population, and quickly went to work exterminating the local bird fauna.
Disheartened by my futile attempts to block a hundred unseen holes in the small coop a year earlier, I didn’t even attempt to go down that path in the big coop. Instead, I pulled out my greatest defensive weapon, the one that, when used properly at least, has never failed me against ground predators: my electronet fencing. Made up of multiple strands of electrified wire, when properly charged, it’s enough to send any animal not wearing boots (which insulate the shock) involuntarily leaping backward in literal and psychological shock, and extremely reluctant to ever go near it again.
I did something I had never done with it before: I set it up in the snow. This was far from ideal, for every time the snow would melt (which was often in our unusually mild winter), the fence, which is held up by sticking two-pronged stakes at the base of each post into the ground, would topple over. Also, snow, which is water after all, seemed to be a pretty good conductor of electricity, meaning that the shocking power of the fence was greatly reduced, as its bottom wires shorted out on the snow.
My trusty fence, my last and best line of defense, did absolutely nothing to stop the weasel’s nightly incursions. Even if it hadn’t fallen down repeatedly, even if the charge had been sufficient, it was useless against a creature small enough to slip quickly through its mesh. Once again, my enemy’s lilliputian size was one of his greatest strengths. I felt adrift in a sea without solutions.
I have always valued taking a non-lethal approach to any wildlife problems that come up on our farm. We usually have squirrels and mice helping themselves to some of our expensive organic chicken feed; I encased our feed bin in hardware cloth, but it’s hard to keep the mice out, who can exploit the smallest hole. And it’s next to impossible to keep the squirrels out of the chicken’s grain once it’s in the feeders. Farm cats are a common solution - but they target songbirds, too. I also know of some farmers who pick off these little rodents with a pellet gun until their grain losses drop to an acceptable level. I guess my “acceptable” is higher than some; I can live (and let live) with these losses. My overriding goal with this whole farm is to integrate with nature, not fight against it. My philosophy has always been good fences make good neighbours. It’s only when fences fail that farmers turn to bullets, traps, and poison to make up for that failure.
But here I was facing such a failure.
And so I reached for a gun – of sorts. I don’t have a gun license, or own a gun, but my brother-in-law, who also lives on the farm, has a pellet gun. You can load it with blunt pellets, or pointy ones, depending on how much damage you want to do. I wasn’t sure it would even have the firepower to kill the weasel, but hoped it would at least wound or hurt it enough that it wouldn’t return.
This was an act of desperation on two different levels. The first, that I would try to kill a wild animal, who was just trying to make his home here. Wild animals are increasingly rare and precious; who was I, someone who had just moved here a mere decade ago, to shoot to kill a member of a species who was truly indigenous to this land? I imagined the lead pellet tearing into his flesh, the sheer violence of the impact of metal on living tissue.
The second was the sheer improbability of success. I read online about how difficult ermine are to hunt. They are stealthy and smart; the second they sensed your presence, they would be gone. While they are dangerous predators to many small mammals, all the way up to rabbits, hares, and wild turkeys, they themselves are also hunted by a range of larger carnivores. They know what it is to hunt and be hunted, so are doubly vigilant. How would I, a hunter with no experience, ever manage to hit a target so small, so fast, and so nocturnal?
I came up with a plan that I thought might have a small chance of success. I guessed that my enemy might approach the coop from the north – that being the direction the small coop lay in. There was some open ground he would have to expose himself on as he crossed it. I set up a light, shining away from the coop, across this open ground. Then, come nightfall, I installed myself in a broken window of the barn, which overlooked this open ground, and waited.
The sheep looked at me quizzically. What was this human doing in here after dark? In the stillness and quiet, my mind entertained itself with childish fantasies. I was a cop on a stakeout; I was a sniper; I was a soldier in my defensive bunker, assigned to the night watch, alert to enemy attack. In my youth, I enjoyed war movies. Not so much anymore, but the Y chromosome still tends to take men over when we feel the weight of a firearm in our hands and the stakes seem heightened.
But I had to stand to see out the window, and it was cold, and after about an hour, the dreary reality of warfare sunk in and I went back to my comfortable indoor life. The ermine simply struck later that night, taking his nightly tithe of one to three souls.
After that, I went to the next level of desperation. I posted to a local Facebook group, asking if anyone knew of a trapper who could help out. I had been putting out my live trap each night, but the ermine seemed totally uninterested in it. I figured I needed some experienced help.
A number of people gave suggestions, and I called up and spoke to a couple of trappers. They were very kind and generous with their knowledge, and one of them even dropped off some of his homemade traps for me to borrow, but neither felt they could be of much help personally trying to trap him.
The recommendation was to get some rat traps – basically just larger versions of your standard mouse traps – and put them inside a box, with an ermine-sized hole cut in one end. Then put your rat trap just inside the hole, with the bait – some smelly, bloody meat – beyond the trap, so the ermine will have to go past the trap before getting to the bait, and wham! The steel bar will slam down on his head, hopefully killing him instantly.
I bought three traps and tried them out. It was frightening to see with what kinetic force the steel bar would snap down once the trap had been triggered. It would probably break your finger if you let it stray in there. I wasn’t going to test that out.
I didn’t sleep well the first night I set the traps. I felt fairly confident that my ermine adversary would be caught in one of them, and I kept imagining the devastating force this trap would inflict on this living creature, just trying to eat. I felt guilty, but also that it had to be this way – it was him or the chickens. Either he had to go, or the chickens would go, one by one dying violent deaths, and with them my egg business.
I had grown used to the feeling of dread that would rise in me as I opened the chicken coop each morning. How many lifeless bodies would I be collecting this morning? Now that feeling of dread was compounded by my mixed emotions around possibly finding an ermine dead in one of my traps, which I had pulled the kill bars back on and laid in strategic locations. My hands would be ending this innocent animal’s life. He would never return to his cozy burrow. He would never dance his ecstatic war dance again. He would never love another ermine.
I opened the door.
Read Part 3 here. Here’s Part 1 if you missed it.