Archive for April 2018
How About
I’m taking a little evil pleasure in Cyndie’s report that she spotted a lot of fox tracks along the southern trail yesterday, because I know there are no longer any easy pickings to be had here.
Driving home past the neighbor’s farm, I took particular interest in how many of their chickens were wandering about in the thoroughly exposed wide open. I will be completely befuddled if the fox visiting us from the woods between our land and that neighbor’s has been ignoring their flock.
Hoping we get a chance to chat with them about it soon.
Meanwhile, I’ve been playing around with ideas on how we might proceed with our next twelve birds in light of the recent carnivorous outburst by the wild little member of the dog family. How about we domesticate the fox like we do dogs?
Allow me to stretch the boundaries of logic…
Here’s how it could go:
- We trap the fox and attach a shock collar. We still don’t know if it’s a male or female. Since pups are born needing total care from the momma, it’s the father that hunts for the kits when they are young. Our visitor could be either.
- We place customized high technology chips into each chicken, programmed to trigger the shock collar within 20 feet proximity.
- Then we sit back and watch the perfect solution play out.
If foxes are so intelligent, it shouldn’t take long at all for this one to learn that our chickens are now off the menu.
It could even become a money-maker for us. We could offer to “chip” our neighbor’s chickens, too, for a small handling fee.
Maybe, as long as we’re stretching reality here, we could also have the collar release a scent of moles, voles, and rabbits after the fox leaves the chickens alone, to entice it toward a more preferred hunting focus.
In a world where we are moving toward driverless cars, smart speakers that control home life, and robots with unknowable artificial intelligence potential, my simple chicken protection/fox control idea seems downright quaint.
How about that?
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Quick Fox
That didn’t take long.
From the looks of the feathers that flew, the Buff put up a fight yesterday morning.
Cyndie found the lifeless body beyond the hay shed, not far from our property border to the north. That is a long way from where the trail camera captured the fox crossing our trail in the woods, but it is in the same general northerly direction. We think we have a pretty good idea about what direction from which the threat originates.
Meanwhile, my relocation of the trail cam did not produce the hoped for results. I’m guessing the motion of moving branches was triggering the captures. I scanned 722 images and found one with a nice face shot of a squirrel and one blur of a smaller squirrel leaping through the air. Nothing else, beyond wiggling branches.
Having read about the superb cunning of fox behavior, and their ability to learn patterns of our movement, I’m even more impressed over the great snapshot we have from the morning last week when the two Barred Plymouth Rock hens were dispatched.
It is not lost on us that the elusiveness of this predator has kept us entirely blind to its presence, beyond the one picture. Even though it has obviously been active during the day when we are out and about, neither of us has ever seen it with our own eyes.
Foxy, indeed.
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Being Stalked
She’s all alone, but not alone. Our sole survivor from last year’s brood, this amazing Buff Orpington, has finally ended her non-stop calling for her two most recent missing companions.
She has avoided death on multiple occasions, once even getting bloodied from a too close encounter within Delilah’s jaws. Now, left to fend for herself alone on the roost in single-digit cold overnight temperatures, she seems to be doing her best to tough out her rather dire situation.
The hungry spring predators appear to be stalking with unprecedented boldness. Based on our experience the last five years, the number of roaming tracks in the snow during daylight hours has picked up significantly.
Yesterday, every time we turned around there were fresh tracks showing up in areas we had recently walked, and they weren’t all the same. I would guess a dog or coyote, probably a cat, and definitely that troublesome fox.
I pulled the memory card from the trail camera, only to find the sly critter had completely avoided detection. Based on her travel pattern, I have relocated the camera, pointing it off the trail into the woods where I hope to catch her looking more into the view, as opposed to walking across it. This will also reduce the repeating shots of Delilah and us walking the trail that tends to clutter the results.
If you look at the shot of the fox I posted the other day, she was leaving our property with nothing in her mouth. Following yesterday’s tracks led us to two different spots where a large number of feathers revealed locations where the future meals had been stashed.
Cyndie wondered about putting extra effort to protect the buff against the obvious stalkers, and as a result, we did end up coercing her back into the coop early in the afternoon. One way I look at the possible inevitability of her fate is that it would save us needing to convince the year-old chicken to accept the twelve new chicks (now looking a lot like “tweens”) that will soon be moving to the coop.
By the time the next brood makes it to the free-ranging stage of life, the phase of ravenous spring predation will have calmed to the occasional massacre by some roving set of fangs like we suffered last June. Then we’ll find out which of our new birds are as cunning and lucky as the Barred Plymouth Rocks and our lone Buff Orpington were.
It’s no wonder why free-range birds are so precious.
It’s a jungle out there. So to speak.
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Image Inversion
One more image from Cyndie’s latest collection taken after the recent snowfall:
If you look at it long enough, at the right angle, this is one of those photos where the perception can become inverted, and the high spots suddenly appear as recessed.
The image will take on a softer, fuzzier appearance. Once the mind shifts to the inverted perception, it can be very difficult to switch back again.
Which do you see?
It’s all in how you interpret the shadows and highlights of the snow that actually rests on top of the swirling pattern of the mat that sits outside our front door.
When you can see that the snow puffs up on top of the mat, the image will seem more crisp.
When the perception flips, the puffy snow will suddenly invert and look sunk below the surrounding cutouts of the pattern swirls.
Flip Out, man!
No drugs required.
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Natural Wonders
When I first saw this image that Cyndie captured, I struggled to imagine what could have made these intriguing tracks in the snow.
The alternating diagonal slices in the snow had me thinking of a large bird of prey dragging its talons as it “ran” across the surface while taking off.
Seemed like there should also be evidence of flapping wings, too. There wasn’t.
Closer review led to a much less dramatic, but still rather surprising cause.
The snow that had stuck to the wires of our fence was blowing off in long chunks and creating the lines on the surface below.
Cool!
I wouldn’t have been able to create that artwork if I tried.
Thank you, Mother Nature.
Oh, but nature wasn’t done creating. In an evening walk, Cyndie took one more picture of the fence wires.
Once again, the shadow of the wires was having a visible influence on the melting of the snow beneath the bright April sunshine.
Many thanks to Cyndie for her keen eye and crafty image captures!
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Snow Motion
Here I go again. If I’m not writing about our animals, I must be fussing about the weather. It’s too warm, too soon; or raining way too much; or getting too dry; or… wait for it: snowing too much in April.
It’s always something.
Well, when it is too much snow, and a person needs to drive 65 miles across the heart of the population center of a large metropolitan area, it may also involve a day staying home from work in the middle of the week.
There isn’t much more than that to tell. I stayed home to avoid the traffic risks and spent my precious time shoveling and plowing too many inches of sticky spring snow.
Can I just say, snowman-making snow is not friendly for plowing. It’s already a known fact it is a pain in the back for shoveling, but my poor Grizzly and plow-blade setup does not like pushing snow that sticks together in giant blocks and to everything that presses against it.
Luckily, when the blade frame came loose beneath the ATV under the strain of the heavy snow I was trying to push, it wasn’t because something broke.
One of the holding pins had worked its way out and was laying somewhere along the quarter-mile length of our driveway.
Not to worry, I keep spare pins on hand. This isn’t my first winter here, you know?
Okay, okay, I have spares because this happened one other wicked winter when I had no clue the pins might come out under stressful plowing conditions and I was left stranded at the end of the driveway with a crippled rig.
Despite the challenges of this year’s spring season arriving in “snow-motion,” I’m not stressing over it.
It gave me an extra day off from driving to work!
(For the record, the pictures above were taken in the middle of the day yesterday, about half-way to our total accumulation. We received even more snow than shown by these images.)
Happy spring, everyone!
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Last One
And then there was one. Cyndie came inside from feeding the horses yesterday around dinner time and reported that the Buff Orpington was the only chicken under the barn overhang.
The chickens are usually eager for her afternoon chores because they get a fresh serving of treats to eat. It was uncharacteristic for the two Barred Plymouth Rock hens to not show up. In addition, it was snowing like crazy, so it seemed odd that they would be off gallivanting around the property without the Buff.
That pointed to nothing good.
I put on my winter gear and joined Cyndie and Delilah in a scouting mission around the grounds. We circled past the trail cam, and I grabbed the memory card from it.
Cyndie had picked up three eggs from the coop in the afternoon, but our search didn’t come across any tracks revealing recent activity in the vicinity.
We headed inside with a sinking feeling of more loss.
For all the multitude of empty scenes that regularly show up on the trail cam, this time we landed one positive ID out of the nine images on the card.
That little fox walking toward the fence was ten minutes ahead of Cyndie and Delilah walking down that trail on their noon trek. They never saw it, but I bet Delilah smelled the scent.
We took a tiny bit of solace in the fact there was no chicken in the fox’s mouth in the image.
At dusk, with a looming trepidation, Cyndie went down to close the coop. The Buff was in there all by herself. With Delilah, Cyndie walked one more loop around the back pasture for any sign of what may have happened.
It was Delilah who took noticeable interest in a dark spot inside the fence. Cyndie tied Delilah outside and climbed through the wires and found the proof of our worst fear.
Now we are wondering if we will be able to accelerate the introduction of our new chicks to the lone surviving chicken from last year’s flock. The poor girl must have been cold and lonely all alone last night in the coop.
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Melt Art
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When life gives you snow, make portraits!
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The good news, yesterday’s blue sky and high sun melted a lot of the snow that fell overnight on Friday, even though the air temperature stayed cold.
The bad news, more snow and continued cold air is what lies ahead this week.
The silver lining, plenty of new photo opportunities!
April Fooling
We get the joke. Today starts the fourth month of 2018, and despite the general trend of average warmth climbing around the globe, we woke to teeth-chattering cold. The clear sky overnight was wonderful for viewing the blue moon, but it also contributed to the drop in temperature.
We had a reading of 10°(F) before the sun came up. With the fresh coating of snow on the ground from Friday night’s storm, there is cold in the air, as well as radiating from the ground.
We’re not laughing.
It seems like the forest animals weren’t much interested in facing the cold, either. In a search for tracks around the full perimeter of our property, there were surprisingly few foot prints revealing activity. Based on the evidence we collected, a rabbit was the only critter moving around.
At least we know that it didn’t have any problems with dodging predators.
The cougar that growled near Cyndie and Delilah last week is likely long gone after its journey past our home. We did a search in the neighboring woods where the eery sounds came from last week, but did not find any hint of a foot print or disturbed snow where the drama played out.
In a long shot reaction, I mounted our trail camera to observe the trail closest to the area, but it only provided added evidence that nothing was moving around after the snow, except Delilah and me.
Yesterday, Cyndie unleashed a great weapon against cold and snow. She filled the house with the smells of fresh-baked buns and whipped together a couple of egg bakes for a family brunch today.
No foolin’.
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Relative Something 