and I have a taste for chicken. Unlucky tonight, presumably a hefty zap to the snout offends…
Stoats and weasels are native predators to Britain, and stoats in particular have a bad attitude when it comes to chicken, so we’ve had to reinforce the chicks’ house with narrower gauge mesh, 1.5cm seems to be the generally expected smallest gap a stoat can get through. Stoats don’t like covering open ground, preferring to move along the hedgerows like a lot of native wildlife.
This is reasonable evidence of a stoat being the culprit – these cameras aren’t very good for something that small. They work by sensing the predators body heat, but the light-of-a-thousand-suns effect of the flash makes it better for large predators like foxes than for something only a foot long.
Not your lucky day today, Mr Stoat. Hopefully a couple of zaps to the snout will put you off and you’ll get back to what you should be doing, controlling mouse-like rodents for us in the hedgerows.