Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire The Great Texas Coon War!

Here's a live trap strory from just recently.

We've had a very rough chicken year. We generally, for 15 years or so, have let them range at will over a couple acres. We lose 1-2 birds a year; an acceptable tax to pay to the wildlife. They'd usually get some daffy bird that was foraging at dusk in the ferns at the edge of the woods... I kill about 1-2 raccoons or possums a year on average.

But this year, something changed, and something started grabbing them very boldly. As in, right up near the house in broad daylight. You'd find a pile of feathers, and I'd always grab a gun and my Lab and run out and try to get it... over the years I've gotten a few coons that way, they'd tree up and I'd spot them by their eyes and shoot them out of the tree. Good times. But this critter wasn't doing that.

Set out a live trap, Harbor Freight version of the Have-A-Heart, and didn't catch anything but a big grey squirrel. Still, it was worth a try so I left it out and checked it every day.

So a couple weeks ago I go out there (into my woods) to check it and from a distance I can see it was sprung shut. Whoopee! Like a kid at Christmas I approach. As I get closer, I'm like, what the heck?! No critter! Closer still and I begin to pick out color in the dim woodsy light... red. Uh oh.

Get there and it's appalling. There's blood EVERYWHERE. It's all over the inside of the mesh, all over the trip panel... It's unbelievable. My first though was that something had chewed it's leg off but soon I realized that was a Very Dumb Thought. Finally I realized that I'd caught something, and something ELSE had somehow reached through the mesh and taken out the poor trapped critter in very small pieces!.

Brought the live trap in.

Oh- we figured out our predator. Busted him one late afternoon in plain sight in our back "yard" (field) trying to get our little chicks, which we'd bought in July (which is not how you normally do it) to get our flock back up to a dozen or so hens. They were in a "chicken tractor" so he couldn't get them. I didn't shoot it.

It was hard to capture the gore inside that trap in a photo; if you zoom in you might be able to see it on the mesh: