A small weasel/ermine has moved in to my hay barn, and as much as I appreciate the rodent-control aspect, I’m concerned about my chickens.
It’s a very, very small weasel – I imagine it could actually squeeze through chicken wire.
It could 
I lost 13 chickens last year, 10 in one night to some kind of weasel.
I wish I had a solution to move him along. I don’t. If he is a problem I’d have to say humane death I hate typing that.
[QUOTE=brody;7888522]
It could
I lost 13 chickens last year, 10 in one night to some kind of weasel.
I wish I had a solution to move him along. I don’t. If he is a problem I’d have to say humane death I hate typing that.[/QUOTE]
10 in one night?!?! That’s awful!
I will probably not wait until he is an actual problem. I know he has just moved in, because I just started seeing tracks in the snow 2 days ago, and the ground has been snow-covered for almost a month now.
Be careful about rehoming him; small he may be but as a predator, he could be killed pretty quick if you move him into a territory with other predators who would kill him.
Call your department of environm protection people in your state after you have identified him specifically, and ask them how to manage him.
Personally, I would protect my chickens and not harrass him. He serves a purpose in the ecosystem, and if he leaves, something else moves in, so I would get the chickens protected from him and only worry about them if you actually see him bothering them.
If he’s truly small, like a least weasel or something, they feed on mice, not chickens. It would have to be a pretty large weasel to go after your chickens it seems to me, but before you hunt it, ID it and find out from your county agent what its doing in your barn. Please leave it alone. It may well be the lesser of two weasles.
I really, truly would like to just leave it alone. However, I’m responsible for my chickens and they take priority in this situation.
I’m going to talk to my husband tonight about a live trap… we can probably release him far enough away from the barn that he won’t come back (we have almost 74 acres). But he may very well be eaten by coyotes, foxes, owls, etc and I will take no responsibility for that!
A friend of mine has lost a couple of chickens to a weasel. It eats only the heads.
Unless you are 100% confident that it can’t get into the coop, it poses a threat.
David
[QUOTE=brody;7888522]
It could
I lost 13 chickens last year, 10 in one night to some kind of weasel.
I wish I had a solution to move him along. I don’t. If he is a problem I’d have to say humane death I hate typing that.[/QUOTE]
My mother-in-law just lost 11 in one night. Only two were spared. The weasel(s) got in the coop through a 2" X 3" hole. Most of the (headless) chickens were found by the hole; she thinks the weasel was trying to pull them back out of the coop but was unable.
Good luck trapping him. Maybe putting him in a wooded area, would raise his survival rate. Sure are helpful in varmint removal, but could be difficult with chickens.
Any chance of covering the lower chicken wire with smaller hole wire, so he is blocked out of the run area? I don’t think they climb like raccoons, so he could be deterred and quit trying to enter.
My mother cat caught and killed a weasel-a-day while on our enclosed front porch with her litter of kittens, but didn’t eat them. I think it was a mother weasel and her older litter, out learning to hunt. We made a joke about having enough skins to make a wallet cover, if we had skinned all of them! They were winter white at the time, would have been pretty. I expect the weasels were attracted by field mice nesting near the porch. Mama Cat was not letting the weasels hunt her area though, maybe protecting her kittens too. She was DARN fast to be able to kill them. Weasels are both fast and fierce fighters. I didn’t even know we had weasels in our area, before finding the dead ones!
Too bad for your weasel, right varmint for the mice, bad location choice near the chickens. Hope he is able to be moved.
Can you double the wire on the hens? (sort of cross the pattern so it makes tiny holes?) Weasels are such valuable little predators. Hell on rodents. I wish I had one in my barn right now–rats are nasty, and hard to kill.
I use hardware cloth with 1/2" openings. Chicken wire is pretty useless, predators can defeat it quite easily. I believe weasels are nocturnal hunters, so if you protect your chicken coop, you can probably coexist pretty well.
PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE MAIL IT TO ME. I want a weasel so bad, they won’t visit me.
Fortify your chicken coop – trapping & relocation often makes people feel more “humane,” but generally the relocated animal will die because it does not know the territory, particularly predators. Food & water sources are learned. It’s one of the many urban myths I fight as a wildlife biologist. If you insist on getting rid of wildlife, it is far more humane to dispatch it quickly with a good shot rather than stress & relocate it to an unfamiliar area.
I am always saddened when people find wildlife deaths a laughing matter – we put tasty treats in their yard, they can’t read boundary surveys. I also work for our state natural resources agency, so I am well aware that depredation is an expensive issue for people whose livelihoods depend on crops or livestock – it’s all a balance, but a very serious one.
As said, hardware cloth.
My coop is pretty secure, but to do the run would be next to impossible due to it’s size, the fact that some of it is under snow, and the ground is frozen.
If they do only hunt at night, maybe I don’t really need to worry… also, the chickens’ roost is about 4 feet off the ground; can a weasel get up there? The step up is about 2 feet off the ground… so unless it can jump or climb an interior wall of the coop, I don’t know how it would actually get to the chickens.
My understanding (not from real life, but an explanation of the Pop Goes the Weasel song) is that the weasel sometimes lures the chickens to stick their heads through the fence, and pop goes the head. So the fence has to be chicken proof too.
I just read that you actually need hardware cloth fencing 5 feet tall and buried 4 feet underground to keep out weasels. That is NOT going to happen
We are just riding out (another) snow storm tonight… might go out to look for a live trap tomorrow after work.
If we catch him, we’ll go for a snowshoe out to the far back of our property which is heavily wooded and surrounded by other heavily wooded properties. There is a creek that runs through it and about a million rabbits live out there. He hasn’t lived here long so I don’t feel too badly about moving him.
Wildlifer, you are welcome to come get him! I’ll trade you for some bats, if you have any! Those have sadly gone missing in the last two years
Do cats keep them away? I haven’t had a cat around here for about 6 months.
My barn cats have killed 2 in the last 10 years. Those are the only ones I’ve seen. There may be more but they are not obvious.
a short tailed weasel or a least weasel ( depending on where you live) is of no threat to something as big as a chicken.
they are rodent and bunny hunters.
a mink, on the other hand, which is a member of the weasel family, is of concern.
You can consult your fish and wildlife department for info and help
My research seems to indicate short-tailed weasels are indeed capable of killing chickens.
