Chicken Killer

A friend of mine has a neighbor who has 10 chickens. Or should I say had 10 chickens - now there are only 2 left. This is pretty common around here since a lot of people have small pets or small livestock and don't always get them properly secured. The neighbor believes it was from coyotes, but I have other theories. It is true that there are coyotes in the area, but they travel through that area more than live there and while I have seen and killed coyotes in the vicinity of said neighbor's house, I knew that the coyote always gets the bad rap when it can be something else to blame.

Often it's raccoons or bobcats when people think it's coyotes, and even though it had been a couple of weeks since the 'attack' I drove out there to take a look. Since some of the chickens were not carried off, my mind went back to a few other times I have solved predator problems for people. This seemed like the work of a cat.

So off I went into the nearby brush, checking in washes and along the narrow dirt trails. Not a single coyote track in the recent mud, but there they were - a little faint, but they were bobcat tracks. After walking around for about 30 minutes I was now about 1/4 mile from the house, and on a patch of dirt road I found a nice pile of bobcat scat.



What makes this pile so nice, you ask? Check the upper right corner. That's right - part of a chicken foot. Now you don't have to be on CSI to figure this one out, and picking through the scat a little more I found feather fragments and more parts of chicken feet. The point of all this is to say that a little scouting can go a long way, and that coyotes, while devious and crafty, are not always the culprits of missing pets or dead livestock. I'm pretty tempted to put a game camera up near the chickens and in the wash nearby and I'd wager that I'd catch a picture of a bobcat on it.

Bobcat season opens exactly 1 week from now, and you can bet your camouflage that I'll be out there, trying to trick ol' bob into coming a little closer.