One of the unfortunate things about living on a farm is that not all the animals that live with you are welcome. I'm not talking about the foxes and coyotes; they don't live here, they live way off in the woods and just come by when they are hungry for chicken nuggets. I'm not even talking about the raccoons, although we've had a few run-ins with them over the years.
No, I'm talking about one critter in particular. Or, in this case, three of them.
That's right, three of them. A couple of years ago I caught a skunk in a homemade trap and released it a couple of miles away from our place. But I learned that skunks will always find their way back to the home they have chosen for themselves. Which in this case was our barn. And so it did.
We hadn't had any issues with skunks showing up for quite a while, though. Not until a couple of months ago, that is. Our barn cats couldn't eat their own food without the big skunk showing up and scarfing it all down. So, I kept trying to move the food where the skunk couldn't get to it but the cats could. Eventually, I finally settled on putting the food on top of the empty rabbit hutch. The cats can get up there; we named the first one Spider-Cat for a reason. Her kids can climb as well as she can.
Now, skunks do serve one useful purpose: Predators stay the hell away from skunk-infested barns. So we haven't had to worry about foxes showing up like we did earlier in the year when a single fox came in and took out no fewer than eighteen of our birds before we chased it off. But in the end, I don't want my barn smelling like skunk. So, believing there was just the one skunk, we planned to get rid of it.
Over the past several months, we had someone coming over to help out with the chickens while I recovered from my heart surgery. She was very interested in having a hat made of skunk fur, and it takes three skunks to make a hat. So, we called someone we know from the farmer's market who is a professional trapper. She came over and set up the trap for us. It took a few days (and two misfires with extremely pissed-off cats being trapped instead of the skunk), but we finally caught the stinker. Off it went with our trapper friend; what she did to take care of the skunk is not anything I want to know about. All I cared about was that the skunk was gone.
Except that the next day, I saw the skunk. The big one, with the massive stripes down its back. I realized that the skunk we trapped was actually a smaller one; a younger one. Great. Now we had a family of skunks to deal with.
Since trapping costs a hefty sum, we bought a trap ourselves. I assembled it and put it out in the barn the night I saw the skunk in the chicken coop. In the morning, I checked the trap...and big momma was in there. Skunk Two, bagged and tagged. The trapper came out that day and took the skunk away. Sure enough, though...
Two nights later, I saw the third skunk. We got our trap back today, and I set it up this evening when I put the chickens to bed. I checked it a few hours later to make sure there was no cat in there, and I was rewarded with the unblinking stare of a trapped skunk. That's three. We'll call the trapper again in the morning so she can come and pick up the third one, and our chicken helper will finally get her hat.
There are those who might think I should feel guilt about trapping these skunks, knowing their ultimate fate. Well, I tried letting one off with a warning, and it didn't take. So, there are consequences to breaking my rules, and the skunks will now have to live (or not) with those consequences. Such is life on the farm.
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