A Tale of Two Critters

A couple of nights ago, we lost one of the male ducks to some kind of predator.  My research into the way the drake met his end revealed that our culprit was either a possum or a raccoon.  We haven't seen any raccoons around the house, but several possums visit nightly, waddle onto the front porch and consume whatever is left of the cat food.  We can hear them crunching and usually turn on the light to identify which of the several ones around has come to dinner. Silky?  Blacky? Stubby?   But I digress...

I was not happy about the loss of the drake and was totally unwilling to lose another.  The ducks are really close to the house, the idea being to deter predators.  I turned on the outside light and tried to keep watch.  Indeed a possum did show up just after dark, but all he was eating was leftover duck food.  I ran him off.

Last night, I sat in the den with one ear cocked.  I'd moved the duck food hoping the possums would stay away, but then just after dark again, I heard a duck in distress.  I flew out the side door, down the steps, tripped over the garden fence, lost my reading glasses and confronted an awful sight.  A possum, finding no leftover duck food to munch, was chewing on the duck's leg instead!  I flapped my arms at him and he reluctantly let go and backed off.  My yelling brought my husband and daughter.  Hubby volunteered to either shoot or remove the varmint, but I know he didn't really want to have to shoot it.  I was torn.  "He's a duck killer!  He should be shot...Oh, just catch him and get him out of here." 

He was fairly easily cornered in the duck shelter and transported out of the pen by the tail.  We depositied him into an empty bucket with a tight lid.  We were in the process of deporting him a couple of miles down the road when we had to swerve to miss a small round feathery orb in the road.

"Was that an owl?  I think that was a screech,"  my husband said backing up the truck.  He hopped out and by the light of the headlights rescued the stunned bird, placing him in yet another bucket with a lid that I had in the truck.  (Which just goes to show you can never really have too many buckets).  The bird flapped around in his bucket while we went on to the release site and let the surprisingly calm, duck-killing possum free. I hope no one around there has ducks.

Back home we opened the bucket and removed the screech owl with gloved hands.  They can deliver quite a hurt with claws and beak.  This one was fairly calm and probably a little dazed. We are guessing he was bumped by a car.  After taking photos and dubbing him Owl Gore, we left him on the porch with the bucket on it's side as shelter.  We kept an eye on him for a couple of hours, but sometime around 10:30 he must have gotten his wits about him and flew off into the October night. At least we hope that is what happened and that he didn't become the latest victim of the killer possums.

The chewed duck is recovering.

Owl Gore

Day Length

The effects of day length on animals fascinates me, almost qualifying as miraculous in my mind. As we put the winter solstice further behind us and move toward the spring equinox, the days are ever so gradually lengthening. The change might be nearly imperceptible to us, but my hens have noticed and are celebrating the change by beginning to lay eggs. I am now getting 3-4 a day, which is encouraging. I have also noticed that on sunny mornings, even when the temperatures remain cold, there is more birdsong. Apparently the longer days encourage male birds to start singing in hopes of attracting a mate. So yes, it is still winter, but "if winter comes can spring be far behind?

And Still It Snows...
Out of school again today due to weather...no surprise there.  The main roads are clear but every little hollow and hill in the mountains has its own private road and those are still, as I understand it, impassable.  I know ours is still snow-covered.
After a relatively warm (it got up to 34) day yesterday, temps dropped to the teens last night and today it hasn't been out of the twenties.  The result it that some places that had managed to melt yesterday are now frozen solid and everywhere the snow has  a layer of crunchy ice on top.  When I walked down to the barn today, I enjoyed the sensation of breaking through the crust with every step.  Underneath, the snow is no longer snowball-making consistency, but has frozen into a fine powder that won't stick together at all. 
The birds have been very active at the feeders today so I know it must be getting difficult for them to find anything else to eat out there. I've seen thirty or so at time at the feeders today with more stationed nearby in the trees.

Save the Chickens

Our poor chickens have been under attack since the weekend of Thanksgiving.  I started out with 40 or so in early fall and today I counted 20, 18 hens and 2 roosters.  Back in late summer we had to put our livestock guardian dog down. I guess I didn't truly appreciate all that Lance did to protect the flock, but I am beginning to get it.  Predation is worse in winter anyway, and apparently something or several somethings are treating our unguarded, free-range flock as its own private buffet. 

I do think part of the losses are from aerial predators.  We have seen hawks about, both red tails and chicken hawks.  And we hear owls.  We have also seen fox, coyote, raccoon and bobcat in the area at times not to mention domestic dogs and cats, so there is no shortage of predators around.

So yesterday when I found yet another clump of owner-less feathers in the snow, I decided enough was enough.  I inventoried what we had around to work with and came up with a plan to quickly attach a run to the hen house.  I firmly believe that chickens allowed to really free range are healthier and produce better eggs, but I guess they would prefer confinement to a house and run rather than say, being dead. 

First I cleaned the bedding out of the house, put it in the composter and replaced it with clean.  I usually use recycled paper shreds from the school for bedding, but this time I used some very old hay that had been stored in the barn too long to be any good for feed.  Next I used a section of our portable electric fence to make the run.  It was difficult to stick the posts in the frozen ground, but doable.  I doubled the fence around twice because it was too long and I didn't want to cut it.  I figured double fencing couldn't hurt anyhow.  Finally, I stretched bird netting tightly over the run and attached it to the fence with cable ties.  Last time I tried the poultry net fencing, my chickens just flew right over it any time they felt like it, so hopefully the top netting will keep them in as well as "death from above" out.



I managed to persuade most of the chickens that this was a good idea.  I still have four renegade hens to capture somehow, but that is a job for another day.

The horses were extremely curious about this new arrangement and were totally in the way during the whole project.  They are inspecting the finished project in the photo above.



A view from about halfway up the hill.  Still plenty of snow here, but it is starting to melt.



More Snow...
Fell on Pleasant Places this weekend. It started Friday afternoon--huge, wet flakes that covered quickly and hung on every twig. It was beautiful. I have not seen it snow like that in many years. We got about four inches before it turned into a wintry mix that night, into rain most of Saturday and then back to flurries yesterday around dusk.
We still have some snow around and it is colder today, but the sun just popped through. When I stand in it I can feel that it's intensity is gaining ground as the days grow longer. And there are other harbingers of spring. The chickens have begun to give us a few eggs every day and seem to be generally more active. Bulb foliage is peaking up through the snow and wet mulch in my flower beds and the birds are much more vocal and active as well. We are seeing more possums out and about--unfortunately we know this because of their unsuccessful attempts at road crossing. Soon we may see ( or smell) skunks, later peepers, finally hoot owls. That is the rhythm of the progressing season. But, in the meantime, tomorrow is only February 1. We will have more raw, cold weather. Even in the midst of spring, winter will attempt several last stands. Eventually, spring and warmth will win. I look forward to that season, but right now I plan to enjoy this one with a cup of hot coffee beside a fire.

Snow Tracking

The snow isn't very deep, but it is the powdery kind that sort of squeaks and crunches underfoot. When it snows, I like to look for animal tracks on my way down to the barn. Yesterday I saw that a deer, probably our old friend Doa or her children, had crossed our yard and hill pasture. I saw our dog Lance's tracks as well. His are distinct from other dogs' because they are bigger than most and because you can see where his bushy tail drags the snow a little. This morning I saw that a rabbit had hopped all the way up the road through the pasture. Now why would he do that? Of course there are also many bird tracks and around the barn, chicken tracks.

If we were keeping score, the animals would be winning. They have seriously damaged all previous gardening attempts and appear to be outsmarting us humans yet again. After having woodchucks eat the corn, a deer eat the asparagus and rabbits eat the green beans last year, we had decided that the garden area definitely would require a fence. Instead of building a new deer-proof fence, we decided that we would section off a part of the goat yard, which already has a goat-tested fence and grow the most vulnerable garden crops inside there.

Because we weren't sure it was going to work, we constructed our divider fence out of materials on hand: chicken wire, more metal fence posts, and whatever heavy objects we could find to anchor down the bottom--landscape timbers, heavy boards, blocks, sections of trees. Let me just confess that nothing says "hillbilly" quite like a cobbled together fence. It's a thang of beauty. But my feeling is that if I can grow a good garden...correction, I always GROW a good garden; what I want is to actually harvest and eat it, and if I can do that, I don't care that the fence looks like a Jeff Foxworthy joke. We can build a better fence later...if this indeed works.

So far the chickens found a way under it and scratched up all the early crops. We fixed that. Then for a few days I found an occasional juvenile goat in there. We fixed that. I think. Then I planted the main season stuff, and waited. Nothing. Three weeks. I have never had seeds take this long to come up before so I thought I'd been robbed again, but just as I was giving up hope, a few seedlings began to appear. Corn. Squash. Cutting Flowers. Ahh, at last. The beans were a loss. I think my seed was old, but encouraged to actually have something coming up, I replanted beans and weeded and watered.

And today Doa, the local deer, got in the garden. She didn't eat any of the plants. It was just that she could have , and she was showing me that she could. Well, anyhow, we'll see. I'm thankful for farmer's markets and even grocery stores. Something tells me I will be needing them this year.

On a happier note, it is May! The woods here are full of trillium, bellwort, and may apples. On my ramblings I see the occasional sweet betsy, toadshade and solomon's seal. The pastures have a pretty sprinkling of wood sorrel and indian strawberry. I saw my first indigo buntings of the season this week, those tiny little impossibly blue birds. They are very shy and flit into the feeders and out so quickly it always makes me wonder if I really saw it. And the hummers have returned in force. Unlike the buntings, they are very bold and very agressive. My husband says they have a Napoleon complex. Maybe, but they are mesmerizing and we sit on the porch and watch them every evening.

Tradition says we have one more "winter" to get through, blackberry. The berries are blooming now, but I don't think we'll have any very cold weather. Actually a little break from the heat would be nice, especially if we could get some rain in the bargain.

Meet our asparagus thief. This is a young, female deer that I call Doa (as in "doe, a deer, a female deer.)  Doa was orphaned as a fawn, hand-raised by our neighbors and then released, but she is still very, very tame, and she hangs out a lot at our farm. She seems to think she is either a goat or a dog. One thing she does know though is that she loves fresh asparagus. So do I, so I had to cover up my asparagus bed with wire row covers to protect the plants. Our garden has a low, electric netting fence around it to keep out the resident groundhogs and raccoons, but Doa bounces right over it. We will probably find it necessary to protect other crops from her, but she is so pretty and sweet that it is hard to be too upset with her.