I’ve been seeing some strange bug catching methods on my feeds, so I thought I would share my preferred method for catching and removing critters from the house: a cup and card stock. Put the cup over the insect, slide the card stock under, tada, instant cage. Thin paper can work, but isn’t as secure. Clear plastic cups are awesome, but a glass works too.
This works great for creatures on flat surfaces, and the materials are cheap and readily available.
I still have the trail cam set up to watch the water bowl behind the coop. It turns out that there are at minimum five raccoons washing in the dish. Hm.
I’m not the only one watching. Mr Tom was caught keeping an eye on an opossum coming in for a drink.
I went to fill the water bucket and didn’t notice the frog on the spray head until I started the water. Huh. He was unbothered, but I still transferred him back over to the fence.
It was definitely raccoons using up the water and leaving a dirty sludge in the water bowl. How? They were climbing in the water bowl.
They managed to knock the bowl off the table, so I cleaned it but refilled it on the ground to prevent breakage. The next day the water was still in the bowl. Maybe they only like elevated baths? Or they found someone else’s water dish to bathe in. Or our long-awaited rain shower refilled their usual puddles. The rain was glorious. I sat outside and just watched.
We’ve known that raccoons live in our woods since shortly after we moved in, thanks to our trail cam. They are one of the reasons that my husband built the chicken coop like Fort Knox. It is more effective to design to keep predators out, than to relocate or kill them. More predators will just move back into the area. I regularly check the perimeter for predator incursion and this week found that the back door had been broken.
I made a screen door from 2x4s a hardware cloth so during our hot summers I could let a breeze from the cooler woods pass through the coop. It really helps. A regular screen door wouldn’t hold up to raccoons, and neither would poultry wire, which is why, when I decided to leave solid door open at night, I added hardware cloth. The door halves are secured with latches and locks, but the raccoons have been pushing at the bottom right corner of the door until the opposite joint gave way. The chickens are fine, the raccoons still couldn’t get in, but I needed to reinforce the door. I fixed the joint with two new screws, added a new latch on the inside top, replaced a couple of the hinge screws with longer screws, and put a big rock inside at the bottom of the door.
The raccoons have been hanging around the back of the coop. I have a large water dish back there for the neighborhood cats, and I was perplexed when I would clean and fill the dish, and the next morning it would be nearly empty and filthy.
I set up our trail cam and obtained a photo confirming raccoon activity.
Critters and Craft 