This is an incredibly stupid problem. I am losing more chickens. I still don’t have the automatic chicken door repaired so after counting chickens this week, there were less than a dozen, I decided that a new automatic chicken door was a must. The new door was supposed to be here on Friday and I even went down near closing to the post office in hope that Amazon was correct. They were not, we got notice in the mail on Saturday that there was a package to pickup at the post office. Too bad our post office is closed on weekends. I wish Amazon would use UPS or FedEx so the package just came directly to our house.
I have been checking the camera system regularly at night after feeding the back door cats and I have not seen any predators since the last killing round. Our 20 year old cat has not been seen in over a week and I think she finally snuck off to die. She usually hung pretty tough to the back door area and used the cat igloo we had next to the old house. I did look inside and make sure she did not crawl in the igloo and die like our other old cat did last year and no she was not in there.
Well Friday night I spotted the two raccoons that had gotten away last time from me. They were out back eating the cat food. I ran out with only one spare clip as I keep losing them. They are dropping out onto the ground when I am out blasting away in the dark. I have yet to find one and have already lost two of them. This does put a serious dent in my ability to fling lead as I simply don’t have enough ammunition. I managed to put one down hard fast right outside the door and then had to chase the other one down as it ran alongside the building then coop then ran towards the barn. I ran out of ammunition. I lost my empty clip and I had the gun jam twice during this operation. I have no choice but to tear apart the pistol Sunday night and give it a thorough cleaning, polishing and dainty lube job so it is back to perfection. I do have to say that I have the whole clearing and back on target in the dark thing down to a fairly automatic routine now. It’s time to get the pistol back to its factory functionality.
I also had no idea of the cost of spare magazines, they are running around $25/each. It’s a good thing I am not paying for chicken food. I am putting all my money into predator control. On top of that the coyotes are starting to move down near the house. I almost had to go out and pop some shotgun rounds off onto the back hillside the other night the coyotes were so close. I need a new rifle with a picatinny rail to mount the thermal scope on for the coyotes but that is going to take some time.
There is still at least one skunk left to eliminate then I will have cleared out all of the known predators. I will keep watching the camera though because I am sure we have a few more raccoons in the area. I am down to getting 1-2 eggs/day only now. This is a stupid problem. At one point this summer I had over 45 chickens! I counted less than a dozen on Friday. I will count them again once the new chicken door is installed and they are stuck in the coop at night.
While I was digging around in the bushes for my victims (they ran away) the cows came running over to the fence and started to holler. They get fed apples almost every day so they think all humans should feed them. I spent 20 minutes picking up and tossing them apples from the yard. I noticed two calves that still need ear tags and one needs banding. 
We have a brand new calf but that cow was not getting any where near the fence. She had a brand new calf nursing on her. I could not tell whether it was a boy or a girl from that far away. 
