Whatever plans I may have had for today flew out the window when, early in the morning, my wife came in from her barnyard and announced that we had "a crisis in the henhouse." I spent the better part of the day helping her address that crisis by setting up chicken coop defenses against suspected raccoon raiders. Here is the whole story.

Yesterday, my wife had reported the disappearance of Goldie, one of her preferred egg-laying hens. Not finding her in the coop when she opened it that morning, she had speculated that Goldie might have somehow escaped the previous evening before the coop was closed up for the night. But, alas, no. Because today she found the mangled and torn-asunder body of Cochee, her only Cochin hen, on the roof of the 8-foot chicken coop.

She deduced that a raccoon had found a way to scale the coop wall, crawl into the coop through the ventline that runs along and under the roof, catch and drag out the hen, and then totally shred her. So, we had a job to do if we were going to keep our remaining 5 chickens from suffering a similar fate.

So off we went to obtain the materials and get the tools to completely wrap the roof ventline in tightly-stapled chicken wire so no raccoon could again crawl in. But there was more to be done, because who was to say that a dexterous raccoon would not be able to open one of the rabbit hutch doors and make off with one of my wife's cute bunnies? So we installed raccoon-proof spring-loaded latches on all four rabbitt hutches and weighed each of their swing-up hutch tops with a brick.

That took care of defense. Then on to offense. Because the raccoon(s) had to go.

So that night we set up 2 live traps around the chicken coop (each baited with an open can of tuna) and retired for the night hoping for the best.

I did do some stock portfolio management today and took care of some other paperwork. But that was just minutiae. Today was the day of the raccoon.