did a coon feast on young rabbit...?

I live in suburbia. When we built here in 2008, we were at the end of the subdivision with a pasture up the slope and tilled ground on top. Now there's 40-50 more houses behind us, another 80 to the east (about 2/3rds of them were there in 2008). The end of my lot has a 25 foot wide "easement" that is mostly sloped down to a "creeklet" that flows through the subdivision. Actually, there's another creeket that comes down the other side of a side hill and joins together at the culverts on the city ground that abuts my property. From there, this larger creek flows about mile and quarter down to the river. My creeklet has cattails and willows and is a wildlife corridor. I've caught a couple of mink on my easement before all the houses behind me showed up. I never have set for coon there and never seen lots of coon activity but I'm sure they come through the creeklet.

Fast forward to now. Most of my easement I've turned into a decent sized garden. Cottontails have been a problem but the numbers are even more now so because I can't kill any right now and my location, after armoring up parts of the garden that had the most rabbit tenders they like eating, I got out my old but still functional (on 1 side) small live trap. I think the main breeder adults won't go into the trap, but I've caught 4 yoy so far and have "migrated" them to a nearby park (mile or more away). I reset the trap last evening using some Swiss chard for bait (first 3 bunnies were caught with no bait) but when I was watering the garden this morning, the trap was gone. I first thought that some kids were along the creeklet last evening and maybe they took it but after watering, I decided I better look around some more. I found the trap about 9-10 feet from where I had it placed, down slope more towards the creeklet and in the heavier grass. It was upside down and empty but looking closer, there were a couple little tuffs of bunny hair and blood spatter on the inside roof of the trap. It appears that a dink rabbit did get caught but didn't make it to the more relocation plan phase of my operation.

I suspect a coon nailed the young rabbit. The trap door that still functions opens pretty easy when the trap is upside down. Not easy enough for the rabbit to free itself but easy enough for 5-digit masked bandit to pull open and get access to bunny. If that's the case, I'll re-set and see if it happens again. Saves me a little gas money...

The coon might have even pulled the rabbit through the wire, piece by piece, if the gaps are big enough for the coon's front paws. I have had coons do that to pigeons and small domestic rabbits in cages before.

Keith

I've seen that twice with all bones pulled through except the rabbit skull and another time it was a grey squirrel skull in the trap. Both traps had 1 x1" wire

1"x 1" wire cages allow raccoons to reach in.

The "mesh" on my little cage is about 1 1/4 to 1 3/8th inches wide-- I didn't measure with a tape measure. I was left with such a little "trophy" as seen in 330-trapper's pic. I reaset the trap and have it in another part of the garden. We'll see what happens...

Wouldn't put it past a feral cat either. Stake the sucker down may keep it busy enough to still be there when you get up.

I put hardware cloth over the 1x1 with small cage clips.

All new traps built I use 1 x 1/2" cage wire