It has been a hard couple of weeks for our chicken population. We had sixteen hens until one day last week when I went out to find one lying dead in the barn. I wanted to dig a hole anyway to see if the frost was gone so this served two purposes - a frost-finding expedition and a poultry funeral. As I was walking back to the barn, I happened to look outside to find three more dead hens. Each of them had met a gory end. Without getting too graphic, their demise was symptomatic of a weasel attack.  

Not knowing much about weasels, I set out to trap it in a live trap. I attached a flimsy flapping door on a chicken cage so that if an animal got into the cage it would be trapped by the door swinging shut behind it. I baited the trap with one of our surviving white hens. I set our old nursery monitor radio in the corner and went to the house to wait for the squawking that must surely ensue when the weasel attack began. My rifle was by the door and I even found some ammunition for it. Darkness set in and I was on full weasel-alert. 

My sons came home about a half-hour later. They went to look in the chicken pen and it was evident they didn’t think much of my trap. They didn’t know that the nursery monitor was out there and that I was on the other end listening. Some things a father is better off not hearing. Anyway, I wasn’t supposed to be eavesdropping on them as I was on weasel-watch. 

It seems that their main complaint was that I used a live hen for bait. My argument for the hen in the trap was that, if the weasel were smart at all, the hen used as bait would be the safest one in the bunch. They were not easy to convince, but as it turns out, I was right. The hen in the trap was safe and so were the rest of the hens. Perhaps the singular weasel, or herd of weasel, or flock of weasel, or whatever, has a sense of humor and has perished through excessive laughter at my trap.  

Having the cart far in front of the horse, or the trap way ahead of the weasel as the case may be, I decided to learn more about the weasel. I deduced that I might be a more effective weasel trapper if I knew more about the weasel. Know thine enemy and all that. We have a book on our shelf that tells about all kinds of North American fauna. The thing that struck me first is that weasels share this book with whales. It must have taken an hour of reading about whales to get to the weasels. (I always read reference books from the back to the front.) Besides, whales are far more interesting than weasels and I’ve never had one attack my chickens. 

I learned that weasels come from a very large family that includes the unsavory skunk. It is also a relative of the badger and wolverine. Its best-known relations are the ermine and mink, which seem like peculiar things to hang around some wealthy woman’s neck. (“Ma’am, I just love that weasel stole you’re wearing.) When it comes to counting blessings, I’m glad I don’t have yet another skunk in the barn, and I am doubly blessed by our lack of badgers and wolverines. The book also assures me that, due to the dietary habits of the weasel family, our barn should be free from squirrels, chipmunks, muskrats, rabbits, snakes and shellfish. Our chickens will be history, but the barn will otherwise be free of almost every other living organism. 

The end of this story came on Sunday. I talked to my friend, Georg, after church. Georg knows about weasels. He told me kindly that there was no way that I was going to catch a weasel. I had already practically concluded the same thing. After the first night of abuse from my sons, I quit using the live chicken as bait in my pitiful trap. I prepared a very nice low-fat ham and cheddar cheese appetizer for the weasel, complete with a toothpick to hold it together, and placed that in the trap as bait. Evidently, the weasel prefers poultry, as it has not been back. Give me a ham and cheese weasel any day and he wouldn’t stand a chance.
 

Updated November 01, 2005