Archive for July 2021
Poignant Reminders
Buffalo Bill’s feathers were always so photogenic. These few still are, though he is now gone.
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Three Survivors
It was hard to avoid the harsh reality of our decimated flock of chickens when we returned to Wintervale yesterday afternoon. It was the first opportunity I was able to spend any time in daylight to finally see some of the areas of lost feathers marking where 22 chickens had been snatched.
As I was cleaning up three days of manure in the paddocks, I spoke out loud to myself when I spotted the distinct feather markings of Buffalo Bill. It looked like he didn’t give in without covering a bit of distance.
The poor horses must have seen this whole attack unfold. I hope they weren’t overly stressed by the incursion happening within their fenced confines. Maybe they were able to recognize only the chickens were being targeted.
We had asked our animal-sitter to keep the three surviving pullets shut in the coop until we returned after the weekend so she wouldn’t have to fret over their vulnerability.
Now we are faced with deciding if we are going to continue that practice or not. It’s sad but neither Cyndie nor I seem to have much will to invest any more hope toward an imagined future for them with us. I hate to think this way, but part of me wonders if it would have been easier if these three didn’t survive.
Cyndie buttoned up the fence boundaries of the coop courtyard in the two places where we had created the openings for those couple of days of free-ranging before the attack. We let the three prisoners out into the fenced space for a few hours.
I wondered if the coyotes were skulking around the edges of our property watching to see what we were doing. The last four times we have lost chickens happened shortly after we had gone back into the house. That can’t be by chance. The predators have to be watching to see when we are out and when we are not.
If I thought it would help, and if we somehow decided to have chickens again in the future, I’d make it a practice to always come back outside and check on things a few minutes after having gone in the house.
I wish we could offer the three survivors some consolation for the trauma they endured. Standing within the fencing with them yesterday, it was easy to see the new anxiety they exhibited over sudden movement and unexpected sounds. They were very jumpy birds.
Maybe these three had honed their emergency response hiding tactics better than all the rest. It’s sad that I had just written about the flocks’ impressive rush for emergency cover a mere two days before the massacre. I suspect that would protect them better against an assault from the air than the packs of fangs coming after them on the ground.
If those three survivors could talk, I wonder what they would have to say about the traumatic events of last Wednesday around dinner time.
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Nice Distraction
My hope of forgetting about the distressing loss of 22 chickens in one quick event didn’t really work but yesterday’s attempt sure was a nice try. I have to laugh (though it was more like a whimper) now when I look at the images I posted just a few days before the attack, showing all those birds and me sitting among them. That didn’t last long.
Our nice distraction yesterday of friends flying in for a day and the wonderful summeriness of dining on the deck and playing in and on the lake was quintessential lake life. We paddled kayaks and stand-up boards around the island and into the nearby bay, pausing to visit with folks on a neighboring property.
We soaked in the luxurious water and absorbed oodles of solar energy while chatting away the hours. It goes without saying that the food Cyndie and her mom served up was plentiful and divine.
One particularly noteworthy moment of the small-world phenomena came as Mike and Barb were headed down the steps toward Marie’s car for the short drive to the Hayward airport. We had invited a neighboring Wildwood member, Julie, to join us for dinner since she was here alone this weekend. Having visited all day and through the meal on first-name introductions, it wasn’t until we were leaving and Cyndie and Julie were inside cleaning up after the meal that Cyndie mentioned Mike’s Architecture firm does restaurants.
Julie asked what his last name was and then rushed out to re-introduce herself using her last name to reveal Mike and Julie had been working together, albeit, remotely, on one of her restaurants.
Surprise, surprise. And an electric moment for all.
Marie and I watched Barb and Mike’s plane lift off into the hazy air as they departed on their return flight to their lake place in Grand Rapids, MN.
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Mike reported the visibility as “Hayseeee.”
Their visit and the grand day at this lake place were a really nice distraction. Unfortunately, the reality I want to be distracted from remains a cold, hard fact… Still.
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Getting Away
We have made a quick change of scene, which comes at a convenient time to allow our minds to stray from the heavy angst associated with Wednesday’s violent upheaval in all things chicken-related.
Yesterday, Cyndie’s mom drove out to our place and the moment I arrived home from work, the three of us packed up Marie’s car and headed up to the lake.
We picked up a take-n-bake pizza from Coop’s that tasted more scrumptious than ever and turned on the replay of the 17th stage of the Tour de France on the satellite TV.
It served as a balm for my wounded psyche.
Festivities for today involve a visit from special guests. The Wilkuses are flying to the Hayward airport from their cabin near Grand Rapids, MN. How fun is that?!
Primary objective: Swim in the lake. Followed closely by eating too much fun food, gabbing away for hours on end, and probably one more dip in the lake, just because it’s there.
We’ll try to pretend this getaway keeps us from thinking about the loss of almost all of our chickens.
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Beyond Control
The lesson I am being given the opportunity to absorb this week involves the concept of accepting things that are beyond my control. I can lure a raccoon to my trap but I can’t force it to step inside.
That’s one version. There is another that is having a much greater impact on my sensibilities. We just learned that the 20-acre plot adjacent to ours along the northern length was sold by foreclosure this month.
So many questions. How come we failed to discover anything about the situation in advance?
I have subsequently stumbled onto a document that reveals the judgment of foreclosure was entered in early April. The notice of foreclosure sale was drafted in May. The public auction sale at the front entrance of the Pierce County Courthouse was scheduled for July 6th at 9:00 a.m.
Did the property sell?
Who might the new owner(s) be?
Might they plan to build a home on the otherwise forested and cultivated acres?
Could we be at risk of losing our precious natural forest boundary that provides a priceless level of privacy?
I have half-seriously pondered many times how special it would be to purchase the forested acres that surround our rectangle of land on two sides, but never imagined it would be feasible.
To find out now that there was an opportunity I failed to notice is something of a gut punch.
If it was purchased successfully, what happens next is largely out of my control.
I’ll imagine that the new owners will strive to drive off the fox that we think lives in those woods and will be prudent about controlling the raccoon population that probably includes the smart one who seems to know all too well to not fall for my baiting tricks.
If they decide to build a house, I will visualize it being located up on the high ground where I’m sure the cultivated fields offer many prime options. That would be well out of sight from our house so that we wouldn’t be a bother to them, you know.
I plan to do more sleuthing to learn if the sale was recorded, and when/where details were, or will be, made public.
I have no idea what the lag time might be for land record details to be posted online, but nothing new is currently showing at the online land records portal on the county web site.
Meanwhile, a third thing that is now painfully obvious for being out of my control is wild predation on our attempts to free range chickens. I do believe, certainly based on our opinions as of last night, we are done trying. Around dinner time, we lost 22 of our 25 birds.
Sorry, David.
Since Cyndie said this time she has had it for good, I suggested we give you the three survivors.
She said, “They won’t last that long.”
I can’t argue with that assessment.
She did say that you can take our bags of chicken feed, variety of feeders, and multiple waterers.
I’ve seen her change her mind before, but this time I am ready to lobby strongly that she not start over another time.
However, history reveals this as another thing that is beyond my control: Countering her amazing ability to recover enough to regain her glimmer of hope after the immediate pain of the loss eventually eases.
For now, it feels like neither of us wants to repeat this highly unsettling routine one more time.
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Trapping Failures
I thought it would be easy. We watched for a couple of weeks while a pest company trapped eleven raccoons just beyond the net fencing around our chicken coop. I monitored the location with my trail camera and was present to witness how they baited their traps. We provided our trap for their use to increase the chances and it snagged at least one of the eleven, so I know it works.
Since that time, there have been more occasions when it didn’t trip than when it did. One time, a wandering cat cleaned up all the bait without pulling the trigger on the hatch.
Two nights in a row, we overlooked turning the camera back on, losing the chance to see who has been stopping by. Well, one of those nights this cat did trip the latch and got itself trapped, but I didn’t get to see when, or how, or whether any other critters came along before or after.
On Sunday night there wasn’t a single overnight event to trigger the camera. Seems strange to me, except that it successfully captured two pictures of me closing the coop just after I turned it on for the night. After that, nothing.
Yesterday morning, Cyndie reported evidence of lots of shenanigans around the coop overnight. When I got home from work and checked the memory card, there were 83 images throughout the night. The adult and juvenile raccoon were back after days of not seeing them.
Unfortunately, I had not set out the trap for them. It had been relocated to the hay shed where a woodchuck/groundhog has been making daily appearances.
It’s a lot like a game of Whack-a-Mole.
But if I didn’t have any trapping failures, it wouldn’t be nearly as rewarding when we finally do enjoy a little random success.
Meanwhile, we heard a lone coyote howling just after sunset the other night.
Aahhh, country life.
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Perfect Execution
After feeding horses and before heading in for our dinner last night, we spent a little time mingling with the chickens as they foraged the shaded grass between their coop and the barn. Cyndie brought out some chicken treats and worked an exercise of calling for them to come to her as she offers to feed them from her hand.
They haven’t received as much of this training as earlier batches we have raised, and it shows. The reactions were delayed and there was a noticeable lack of total buy-in from the group as a whole. With a bit more practice, it won’t be long until Cyndie frequently finds herself with a trail of birds following behind her as she strolls anywhere near where they happen to be hanging out.
While we were lounging in their presence, practicing trying to account for them by breed as a method of quickly identifying if anyone is missing, we enjoyed the thrill of witnessing a perfectly executed emergency response drill.
Maybe it wasn’t even a drill, but we weren’t able to scope out a possible threat they sensed.
At the sound of one unique call, without hesitation, the twenty-some mix of pullets and cockerels made a mass exodus from the open mowed grass into the thick cover of growth just to the right in the image below.
One second they were all roaming around in the open and in a flash they became instantly invisible.
It is a fascinating thing to watch. We wondered which one made the call, as it wasn’t obvious to us, but whatever was said, it made an immediate impression on all of them.
Probably half a minute later, one bold girl wandered out to reclaim the spot she previously held, and soon after the rest did the same as if nothing had happened.
It all echoed nicely the practice we’ve witnessed many times with horses where they execute an alarming rush to escape the immediate vicinity and a minute later go back to grazing as calmly as ever.
I’m happy our chickens are demonstrating this skill so well, given they are going to need it for the balance of their free-ranging days with us.
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Trouble Starting
Despite the ongoing dry state of our soil, we’ve got areas of grass that well deserved to be mowed over the weekend, but I never got the chance. The ol’ Craftsman lawn tractor wouldn’t start. Actually, it tried to start several times until it stopped rotating the flywheel and just made a whiny sound. That set off days of trial and error troubleshooting. I thought it was the solenoid, but I was wrong. Then I wondered if it had something to do with the battery. That didn’t appear to be the case.
Next, I wondered if the Kohler engine might be seized, because I couldn’t move it. Then I removed the starter and discovered the engine wasn’t seized. The starter seemed okay, so I mounted it back in place, and lo and behold, the engine spun again. Twice, in fact, before it resumed doing nothing but whining.
Now I have a replacement starter on order.
Since I couldn’t mow with the tractor, I switched to the Stihl power trimmer and headed for the labyrinth.
Once again, we are finding that the earth is slowly swallowing the stones we placed to mark the pathway. Even with the ground hard and dry, the rocks seem to settle ever-deeper, and the grass gladly works its way to cover their edges, pushing them down even more.
The horses are doing their part to keep the paddock grass beautifully mowed.
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It crossed my mind that I could use their expertise on the runaway growth of grass between the barn and the chicken coop while the mower is waiting for its starter.
In the amount of time it would require to install temporary fencing around that area, I could take care of things using the power trimmer. If the ordered part doesn’t arrive on the day advertised, I just might do that.
The starter will be here about the same time the weather is predicted to possibly bring rain. It’s frustrating because we really need the rain, but, at the same time, I really want to get the grass cut.
I may not have trouble starting, at that point, but I just might run into trouble finishing.
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Relative Something 