 Welcome back to the channel everybody. We are back fishing down in Austin, the Silver Bullet is parked here at the tree house waiting the next adventure. But we've got adventures here. So today is gonna be a home blog and there's always something going on here at the tree house it seems. We call it the tree house because it's literally just sitting in the trees. There's always some sort of issue and we're constantly battling with the home itself whether it be cracks and things shifting and moving which is kind of normal from Texas. Then we also have the wildlife of the woods. So the carpenter ants and just things like that. We've got lizards and snakes and just the typical stuff that you would expect. But then we also have these other varmints. I mean the mammals, the bobcats, the coyotes. We've got hogs. We haven't had the hogs in a long time because it's been so dry. The ground is extremely hard. Then we have raccoons and then we have possums and foxes and armadillos and just about everything you could imagine comes into this yard on a pretty frequent basis. I feel like we've done a pretty good job keeping the pathways clear. You know having some safe places for Emmy and Ben to play and not have to deal with the snakes and stuff like that. But the rodent creatures, I forgot about the rats. We've had rats inside of the house this year. Perfect example I just discovered two days ago. And this isn't even the creature that I'm not sure about yet. This is definitely a mouse. But if you guys just look right here, a rat or a mouse, whatever, has been chewing on the AC insulation around the pipe there. The pipe's real cold so I don't know if they're just attracted to the coldness since it's so hot outside. They're definitely getting in the house though through that hole. But that's not even the creature that I'm upset about. The mystery creature that I'm upset about is tearing up the yard, terrorizing the yard. And it's not a hog. It's not big enough to be a hog. I don't believe it's a raccoon but something has been going through the yard, going around the house, the base of the house, digging up, tearing into things and just tearing up my grass especially. Now I hate to be the get off my lawn guy at this stage of my life but I feel like I'm getting that way. The last three years I've struggled to get decent grass growth in my yard. I mainly wanted it for erosion purposes. I finally got it this year. It's looking great. All the neighbors are going, dude, what are you using for seed in your yard? It looks so good. I was out there watering it twice a day. I had the sprinklers dialed. You know what I'm saying? I mean, if you middle-aged guys know what I'm talking about, holler at me in the comments because once you get that grass set up growing, I mean, nailed it in the spring to ride out the heat of summer where it's 100 degrees for like 30 days of row here in Texas. But now all that has been screwed up. And I'm just walking out every day to new holes. This has been a few weeks. And it's not just the grass. It's also the plants. OSG is pissed. So she's on me to do something about this creature. It's tearing up her plants and her flower beds and all that stuff. It's even broken one of her favorite little clay pot things. She had some baby wipes in it or something. And I come outside two days ago. The pot is broken on the ground. I'm like, what is going on? We're being attacked here. So a first line of duty. We need to figure out what this actually is. It's been a long time since I've broken out the trail cameras around here. I took them off. The deer lease have been sitting in a box. It's time to break them out. We're gonna be putting them out at the deer lease soon. Anyways, so we're gonna get some cameras out going. And I've already put out some traps. Now let me show you guys what was doing the digging and obviously we're dealing with something clever. So we put in this Jasmine this year. Stephanie did this. This is her little project. And it started to uproot the Jasmine. I know it's hard to see. There's a lot of shadows here, but it's just digging in here and Stephanie's having to come out here each day and recover it with the mulch and the soil because we don't want to stuff dying. This is what prevents erosion. Our house is dependent on erosion at a minimum. We live on a big hill. So we're constantly battling that. We come in here to the flower beds. As you guys can see, it's something's digging in here and getting worms. So it makes me think, worms, beetles, whatever it makes me think. It's like an armadillo or a possum. But the whole pot thing breaking, I want to say that's the old five finger raccoon. But I don't know. Come around to the other side of these beds and you can see a paw trap that I've got laid out here. And last night I set out some shrimp. We had shrimp for dinner. We put some leftover shrimp on there. They were all eaten, but the trap didn't go off. So that's probably a poor job on my part setting this up. It was just kind of a last minute thing. And then it went over here, tore it up, tore up under the azaleas until we reached this soaking hose. So it's dug up all around the soaking hose. There's even a sprinkler pipe that's exposed now. This is all just from last night. We're having to come in here every day, rebury this stuff. Also, we've got chicken updates. Let me take you in here. Also wrote a problem inside here. I'm pretty sure I fixed the issue, but there was a possum that was getting in here and eating the chicken's food at night. Luckily I have this coop door. I've got this automatic coop door and that closes them in completely. So possum could not get to these chickens at night. The chicks I've had in a very small enclosure. It was getting in through the top here. So I took this board, I put that on there and put this other board. And now there's just this little tiny hole. I mean, a mouse could get in here, a rat or something, but I don't think maybe a very small possum could get in there. Not one big enough, I would think, to do much damage. And I've completely redone the pullet and cockerel enclosure here. So let me show you guys this. This is pretty neat. I've been working on this for the last couple of days, but I took some paracord and I've run it on these poles. I way overbuilt this chicken run and I'm glad I did because so many things lurk around here. But what's nice about having these structural posts in the middle is I can separate sections off if I want to and kind of put it in quarters. So I've got a quarter of the run here that's enclosed. I've got some chicken netting, some poultry netting, which is an absolute nightmare. If you guys ever have to deal with this stuff, just use caution if you're around leaves. Any sort of leaf will get caught up in it. Anyway, it got all balled up. It is a complete mess. It started out as a 50 by 50. It ended up as such an odd shape that I just draped over the paracord. And it's working pretty good so far. It's been up for two days now. And the pullets and one cockerel, which I have now identified, are loving it in here. They've got a bunch of perches. It's really cool. I mean, I actually take you guys in here. Colonel Sanders, he can't get in there. He doesn't like the netting. They don't like it when they get caught up in it. It catches everything, including my hat. Say hello to the world. This is my frizzle cockerel right here. You can tell he's gonna be a male. He's already got those waddles and comb rocking. And I think the other frizzle is a female. Look at the polish, man. Polish is crazy. And there's that frizzle. They just come up to you, which is nuts. Just come up to you. They'll let you cut them. They're really soft. They're watering these plants that it looks like fall out here because the dead plant and the dead leaves. And now we've got holes everywhere. Did you show them all these holes? I've been showing them, babe. We're gonna try to fix that tonight. I mean, last night, you and I talked about it. We said we were gonna set out some traps. We had that leftover shrimp, which was perfect. It was a good attractant, but whatever it was, eighth of shrimp did not get caught in the trap. So I'm gonna try to fix the trap where they have to walk over it instead of being able to peek in there and just pick it out. I vote that it's a armadillo. You think it's armadillo? I think it's an armadillo. I'm on Team Possum right now. You're on Team Possum? I am. Nobody's on Team Raccoon? I think the raccoon did the clay pot damage, but I don't think it's digging in the ground after worms. It'd have to be pretty desperate. There's plenty of trash cans it could go to. That's true. The raccoon on our property goes for baby Ben's diapers. Like a couple of times I see like, it is disgusting. He rips open the diaper bag and I see sometimes like Ben's diapers is disgusting. We need to get like a trash can cleaner out here. Well, that would be me. No, we just live in the woods with raccoons eating poopy diapers. So I had to do some digging, but I found all my old trail cameras from the lease. Some of them have been beat up by hogs and cows and like a few of them were broken. So I found one that is working. I just put some batteries in it. So let's go ahead and let's set up this cam on one of the trees here. This is the higher tree. So it should work out. I placed the cam here. All right, so we got our camera set up here in the app and I just got to change the notifications to get images immediately and then we'll be ready to go. Now for the front yard defense. This is what I'm talking about. This is everywhere. These, I mean, these are big holes. These things digging in and then the grass is done and it's new ones every night. Little snooting, little snooting and then there's just big wads of it. Look at this. I mean, this looks like a borderline small pig coming in here and destroying all of that. Just destroying my grass. These are the areas that are just dead. They're dead from all the rooting and I'm not gonna tolerate that. That is not gonna be tolerated here on this grass. Flower beds, same thing. You can see last night that the shrimp shells all the rooting around it and we didn't get trapped. So I'm gonna basically create a funnel somewhere where the animal has to step over that and gets caught in it. So I'm gonna have to take some boards and just create a little path for that thing to step in. So as soon as that server kicks on, I should get immediate updates if something walks through the frame. Next step, we're gonna get some boards. We're going to get maybe some logs and we're gonna set a path for this animal to have to go through. Most animals don't like to step over stuff. They're gonna take the path to least resistance. So I'm going to put some salmon skin. Stephanie is cooking up salmon tonight. This is perfect because it really went for the shrimp. So I'm guessing it likes fishy stuff. So we're gonna take some salmon skins. I'm gonna just kind of trickle it in there. Just trickle it in in this path that I'm gonna make and then I'll put a wad of it on the backside of the trap where it has to walk over it and hopefully get clamped on that. I have a big like cage trap but I've set it out before and I've never gotten anything. I think it's just, it's a lot. It's a lot of convincing for that animal to go in there. I just like the paw traps because A, I mean, if you catch something crazy and you want to let it go and it's not your target species, you can let it go. And B, like they can't see it at all. Like it's buried on the ground so they're gonna most likely step in it if you set it upright. I didn't really set it up like right last night. I set it up where they could walk up to it, eat on top of it and you know, you basically have to step on it for it to really pounce. It's not as sensitive as a mouse trap. So we're gonna set up the little funnel and then that's it. It's basically sitting on our trot line. We're going fishing tonight and it's gonna be dark here in about four or five hours. So hopefully we get something on the line. All right, we got our little funnels made. Let me show you what it came up with. I had these already from the chicken coop. Oh my God, it just bit me in the armpit. Have you ever had that happen? That hurt like a mother bear. Okay, anyway. So I just had these laying around in the chicken run. This is what used to hold their food and their water. So I just propped them up right here. It's nice because I've got these little boards on the back to kind of give it some stability. So hopefully animals gonna smell it, come around, go through here and go over the trap. I've got some salmon. So we'll go ahead and we'll put a little bit on the outside here, just a little taste, a little taster or two, we got it. Just a little something right there for you, a little appetizer. We'll put the back chunk right here at the back, just behind that trap. So basically it has to put its foot right there. Gonna be a juicy one right there. So we'll put it just right there. That should be enough stench. The stuff smells pretty good. Similar to the shrimp that it should work. I just got a ding in my pocket. Hopefully that's our, just got notification for the cameras, detecting motion. Not showing anything yet, got to connect, but it's definitely detecting us. So we'll run around to the front, do the exact same thing. And hopefully this is gonna do it guys. I mean, shrimp attracted them. I was tempted to put catfish bait, but I hate dealing with that. I think the salmon is gonna do it. Super greasy. Little chuckle, little appetizer, and then boom. Main course back there in the corner. I've got a whole piece of plywood. This is one I just had laying around. And I put some stakes on this little two by six right here. And I think that is gonna do it. Now all we gotta do is wait for nighttime. Hopefully we get a snap. All right, so it is about 5.45. And my son, he woke up crying at like 5.15. So I just reached over, grabbed the phone. And I looked to see if I had any images. And we had movement on the front yard camera. So I'm about to go outside and see if anything is in these traps. It's just kind of, it's just blank. It's like something moved through there, but I can't, I can't see anything. And that was at 5.04. So I'm wondering if it's like outside. That's near my, where my son sleeps. I don't know if it's like howling or, you know, squealing or something like that. So let's get the flashlight. Set outside. All right, we're gonna go check the front. See if there's anything in there. That's where the camera had the motion. There's nothing in there. So the skin is still there too. Don't see any new. Gonna go check the backyard. Got the first rooster crowing. Colonel Sanders is crowing. Oh my God, let's see him. Let's see him, we got him. We got him, babe. We got him. Well, look who it is. It's like this little Bilbo Baggins wandered into the wrong shire. It's time to get out the dispatch team. Look at him. It's like just plain dead. He's trying not to move. Your destruction has come to an end, dude. Yes, y'all, the traps worked. Those funnels worked. Now it is time to call in the dispatch team. We got a lot of options. I was actually up late last night working on one of my newer bows. We'll be doing a video on that soon. We're not gonna be using that. We could go full auto. With the one seven seven. But I think the best bet for the money is that guy right there, Old Red. Old Red's already got a light attached to it. Nice little tape job on there. Nothing's ready to go. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a date with the varmit. And we're going into the woods. One of us ain't coming out. All right guys, well the trap definitely did its job. Making those funnels made all the difference. You know, I don't think that is the last one either. I think that there's probably more around here. And I know for sure something with hands or thumbs, whatever, got into our pots like something sneaking around the house. So there's more varmints out here. Plus the ones that took out the last of our flock still lurking around here. So don't think we're done with our backyard varmit quest just yet, but we got one taken out. And I know OSG is going to be psyched when she's making her coffee in just a little bit. I go in there and I tell her, honey, I got the thing that was digging into the flower beds. That means browning points for me, ladies and gentlemen, I did my dadly duties. So thank you guys for tuning in. The sprinklers are just coming on right now. Perfect time. Just took down the cameras, incredible. Gonna do some more home vlogs around here. Got some bow making to do as well. And of course we'll see you out there on the water. So thank you guys again. May God bless you and all your adventures. Godspeed, we'll see you on the next episode.