The battle against the bad mongoose and its friends continues. Mongooses were brought to the island to control rats in the cane fields; they proliferated out of control and now they are the rats. Our egg yield has dropped to near zero and the chickens seem distressed. We have wire mesh buried 6-8” in the ground all around the coop, but where there are concrete piers at the corners of the structure there is no place to staple the mesh, and the mongooses push it away.
At one corner, they seem to have got down below the pier (which was laid many decades before we moved here) and tunneled under it into the henhouse. I think poured concrete is something of an environmental disaster, but stuffing the space with bricks and rocks and spraying structural foam hasn’t helped. We bit the bullet and bought a small bag of concrete mix. With C’s help, I explored with wire until we found the tunnel, dug it out a bit, put a little form around it, and then she scooped freshly-mixed concrete into the space and worked it into the tunnel.
That should stop the pesky critters once and for all. Again.
—2p
addendum 2026-10-07T14:59-10:00
That didn’t stop the mongoose(s). When I went back and looked at it, there was a pretty obvious gap between the concrete we added and the bottom of the pier block. I can even kind of see it in the photo. I added bunches more concrete today to fill it well beyond the bottom of the pier block, and I also poured a bunch of slurry under the block from the other side though it’s hard to know how effective that might be. I guess we’ll know tomorrow!