Vermin

When I got guineas I knew that the biggest challenge to keeping them alive was the local wildlife. The resident red tailed hawk and great horned owl were very real concerns when the birds were little and I did lose one to a bird of prey in the beginning. Nothing attracts possums and raccoons like fowl, and they were always the real worry. When the guineas first moved out of the bathroom I put a strand of electric fence about four inches off the ground all around the coop. I plugged it in every night and didn't have any problems. Eventually the birds got big enough to roost, and once they started that nonsense there was no way to convince them that the coop was a safer place to sleep then high in the trees. They were more susceptible to predators in the trees though and it caused problems to no end.  Opossums and raccoons are pretty resourceful when it comes to getting something to eat. They can't catch the birds on roost but they sure can scare them off and then chase then around the yard all night trying to get a bite to eat. The strategy isn't terribly effective but by morning I've got birds all over the yard and the neighbor's yard and out in the road and my morning starts off with a guinea roundup.
The birds got chased out of the tree exactly one time before I headed off to the store for a live trap. One thing you can be sure of, if a opossum has a choice between trying to hunt a live bird and eating a piece of leftover salmon, they'll always go for the salmon. I was pretty sure I could catch whatever what causing the problems, but what to do with them? We live in a pretty suburban area and I didn't just want to trap something in my yard and drop it off five miles away in someone else's yard. That's not very nice. I could have just killed them, which would have made sense. But no, I decided that I could use this as an opportunity to teach my children about killing/not killing things. They know that I hunt and kill things to eat. They know where the chicken and beef that they eat comes from. They had very recently eaten the chickens that we had raised with the guineas. I thought that since I had been driving home the fact that in order to eat meat something has to die, I could also drive home the fact that we shouldn't kill things just because it's the easiest solution to the problem. Instead we could release them in the Sam Houston National Forest where they could get on with their wild lives without trying to eat my birds. This was an outstanding plan. In theory.
The first night I put out my trap I caught a small opossum. I loaded the kids up and drove him the 25 miles to his new home in the National Forest. They were all able to see an opossum up close for the first time, and watch it play dead, and finally watch it's very odd gait as it ran into the forest. We talked about how creepy opossums looked and how they were marsupials like kangaroos and how our opossum was now going to go on living his opossum life. When we got back home I set the trap again just to make sure. I caught another one. Again I drove it to the National Forest and dropped it off. Three days later I caught a third opossum and sent it to live with it's friends. All was quiet for a while until I started catching raccoons. This time the kids learned that raccoons aren't cute curious loving little animals. They are in fact hulking, snarling merchants of death that want to bite your face off, and they can run really fast when you release them. My kids are now afraid of raccoons. When the numbers are tallied, I've caught seven opossums and four raccoons in the last year and a half. I've driven more than 550 miles transporting these animals and I've still managed to lose 3 or 4 guineas to them. Mostly I've learned that, as a parent, once you've assigned a morally righteous position an action, you must continue with that action. Choose wisely.