I Almost Shot an Injured Coyote Over a Dozen Chickens the Raccoons Were Killing

The Coyote I Was Sure Did It

When my neighbor Marge called me across the street and said her hens were getting picked off, I did what every guy with a rifle and an afternoon to kill does. I looked around for the most obvious suspect, picked one, and rode the idea straight into the dirt without checking a single thing. Twelve chickens in a week and a half. She’d already decided it was a fox. I told her she was half right about it being a dog, just the wrong kind, because the day before I’d glassed a beat up coyote limping through the cut beans on the far side of her tree line. I said a predator with a bad leg gets bolder, gets desperate, starts hitting easy calories wherever it can find them. It hangs around a chicken coop because a coop is a vending machine to a thing that can’t run down a rabbit anymore.

I had never hunted a coyote in my life. Not once. But I had watched enough videos and read enough forum threads to talk like I’d been stacking them up for twenty years, which is its own kind of dangerous. I told Marge I’d take care of it. I’d stake a rotisserie chicken to the ground, climb upwind in my tree climber, and put that injured son of a bitch down the second he came sniffing. If I were a hungry coyote and I caught a whiff of a store bought rotisserie chicken, I told her, I’d risk it. That sounded smart when I said it. It sounded absolutely brain dead about thirty seconds after I hung up.

The Thing About Easy Calories

So I went and did it. Bought a chicken at the store, drove it out to the back corner of her pasture, wired it to a stake, and sat up in a tree with the wind in my face until well after dark. I did that three evenings straight. The only thing that showed up was a stray cat who pretended not to see me and a possum who spent an hour trying to figure out why a cooked bird was nailed to the ground. That possum had more sense about the whole operation than I did.

It was a fella on a forum who finally set me straight, the way strangers on the internet always do when you’d rather they didn’t. He said an injured coyote doesn’t go charging into a chicken coop that stinks of people and dogs and diesel. It looks for something already dead. It eats what it doesn’t have to fight for. Every coyote hunter he knew had watched injured yotes starve in a field before they’d go pester a coop, because even a half crippled coyote understands that the easy calories aren’t the ones somebody is willing to shoot you over. He said set up a trail camera by the coop and find out who’s actually doing the killing, because it’s probably not who I think it is.

That stung, because he was right and I didn’t want him to be. I had already told Marge I’d handle it. I had already built a little story in my head where I was the guy who saved the homestead and got a lifetime of permission to hunt those thirty five acres. I had picked my villain before I had a single piece of evidence, and now this stranger was asking me to admit I might be staking out a chicken for a coyote that never wanted it.

What the Camera Said

I moved the trail cam off the deer trail where I’d had it and pointed it at Marge’s coop. Three days later I pulled the card and sat in my truck scrolling through footage in the parking lot of a gas station, and there it was, plain as anything. Raccoons. A whole family of them, the big boar and two younger ones, coming through the gap in the fence around midnight, one every night, neat as you please. Little hands pulling open a latch I’d have sworn was raccoon proof. Not a fox. Not my poor limping coyote. Raccoons with the dexterity of a seven year old and the nerve to do it right out in the open.

Now, I’ve kept birds. I knew better. Everybody who’s ever owned a chicken in my part of the country knows a raccoon will go through a coop like it owns the place, and your chicken wire is just a suggestion to something with thumbs. But I didn’t want it to be raccoons, because raccoons meant the answer was boring. It meant fixing a fence and setting a live trap and dispatching a masked bandit instead of climbing a tree and being the hero. I’d rather have a good story than a good fence, and that little bit of vanity is exactly what let me nearly shoot the wrong animal.

Then the second lesson showed up in the same batch of footage, and it was harder than the first. A hawk, sitting on the fence rail, watching the yard. And somebody in that same forum thread had warned me about it before I ever saw it. He said it might not even be an animal you’re allowed to shoot, that hawks and a lot of the birds of prey are protected and you can’t just put them on the ground because they eat a laying hen now and then. My dumb ass had never once considered that the thing killing my neighbor’s chickens might be illegal to shoot. I’d gone in so sure the answer was “coyote” that I never stopped to think the answer might be “something it’s against the rules to point a gun at.”