The Poultry Keeper

Ottwell · Joined: 02 Oct 2007 Posts: 18 Location: North Cheshire

Well we are gutted.........we forgot to shut or chooks in on Monday night and lost our one of our fav cheeky girls.

On returning from school my 5 year old daughter noticed that “Freckles” was missing as all of our free rangers come charging over to see you when you park the car. After having a good search around our 1 ½ acres until it was nearly dark and not finding any evidence of a struggle we convinced our daughter to give up and hope she made it back before roosting time. We could feel the cold stale breath of the Grim “Chicken” Reaper standing over us and decided to keep looking once the kids were indoors.

I found Freckle’s body wedged “Cartoon like” upside down with feet sticking straight up, half in half out of an assumed rat hole in some undergrowth. I just knew that when I pulled her out she would be headless and I wasn’t wrong! Sad

Apart from the head missing there was not a mark on her at all, we are not sure if she died during the day and the rats got her and just tried to drag her body into their lair and ate her head when she got wedged or if indeed they had taken her during the night (our fault!) and killed her.

Has anyone had any experience rats doing this before?

We find it strange that they just ate her head and didn’t have a go at her body at all, Freckles was 12 months old and of decent size so it’s a tad worrying with 6 others roaming around alone that we have killer rats on the prowl.

We do have a few Minks and loads of Stoats knocking around but wouldn’t they have made more of a mess of her?

Our daughter thinks Mr fox took her but I am sure he would of killed all of them if he had got into their coop.

That’s what we get for forgetting to shut them in for just one night!
Embarassed

Autumn · Joined: 27 Jun 2008 Posts: 494 Location: Suffolk

What a dreadful thing to happen - so sorry for you all having to go through finding Freckles like that. She might not have been taken at night, so you can't blame yourselves for that, really. Others on here have a lot of experience with rats, foxes, weasles etc so I'm sure someone will be along to help soon. Just wanted to come and say sorry.

MamaPacker · Joined: 20 Aug 2008 Posts: 322 Location: Essex UK - Sarfend

Kitsune · Joined: 13 Mar 2008 Posts: 1410 Location: Manchester

I have had two predator strikes that were my fault, it's not an easy thing to deal with - I do think that she was taken at night, unless she was sick she would have been able to get away from a rat no problem during the day.

Don't blame yourself too much, just learn from the experience.