Skunks

My little chickens survived the coons, but not the Skunk. My Bearded Belgian D'uccle Bantam hens are known not to be terribly prolific, in fact most fanciers inseminate the hens to insure fertile eggs. I've chosen to rely on my Belgian rooster and thus I am lucky to get two or three chicks a years. In late spring we were blessed with one chick. We rushed the hen and her new brood into the safety of the nursery yard to keep it safe. For weeks we closed the little hen and her chick into the nursery box at night and returned in the morning to release them to scratch in the nursery yard.  Finally the hen decided to take her chick and returned to the big house and the rest of the flock.

Just before dusk I do a head count in the coop and close it up for the night to keep the birds safe from the local predators, coons, fox and skunk. I recently saw a coyote in the late afternoon skirting the horse paddock. Early one evening as I was doing my chores, there in the corner of the chicken yard was a skunk thoroughly engaged in eating my one and only chick. What I didn't realize at the time was that it had also killed the mother. What a sense of loss and all for some birds with brains the size of a bean. I was livid but not dumb enough to challenge the skunk while I was standing in the yard with it.  I left the yard, collected a load of large rocks and started pelting the skunk with them through the fence. He moseyed out of the yard and let off a spray in my direction, thankfully I was out of range. The stink lasted for days around the coop. The trap is set every night for the skunk. I will dispatch him.

Skunks are actually beneficial here on the farm and we usually leave them alone unless they start hanging around the house or yard where we might have a stinky encounter with them. Skunks love bees and hornet larvae. They dig up huge yellow jacket nests and eat every one of the larvae and a lot of the adults in the process. When we first came to the farm we trapped and killed every skunk we could but as soon as we learned about their appetite for bees we only destroyed the ones that were actually a problem for us. The result has been a tremendous decrease in the bad tempered hornets.

Our neighbor a quarter mile away is an apiarist and has to trap and destroy all the skunks as one skunk can eat out an entire hive in a single night.