The sugarcane industry imported Indian mongooses in 1883 to try to control the rodent population in cane fields. Instead, the mongoose became the problem. They eat all kinds of things, but most notably ground nesting bird eggs and have driven many bird species to extinction elsewhere. They’re everywhere on the Big Island, though I didn’t see any around the compound until we got chickens.
We already had a problem with mongooses stealing eggs, but we managed to seal off the henhouse pretty well. Unfortunately, we’d stacked a bunch of old roofing material against the back of the henhouse, which I knew would end up providing a nice, sheltered space for a mongoose to work on burrowing under my 6” deep hardware cloth.
Over the last few days, our egg production went from 5-7 eggs/day to 1-2, and we found several broken eggs. The day dawned clear (it wouldn’t last), and we moved the suspect roofing material and found the litter of many eggs shells (and even the remains of a dove) between the roofing and the barn. They had managed to bend back the hardware cloth at one corner (next to a concrete pier where I couldn’t staple it) and burrow a hole around it.
I blocked up the hole, HA and I stacked the usable roofing up by the old shed, and she took the rest to recycling. This afternoon, we had four eggs. I expect more tomorrow, and if they burrow again it should be obvious and we can continue the game of patching breaches as they occur.
—2p