Posts Tagged ‘coyotes’
Fourteenth November
We are in our fourteenth November on these twenty acres and marveling over the thought that we have been tending these fields and forests for that long. Thinking back to when we first arrived, one particular vivid memory stays fresh in my mind. The very first time I ventured off-trail in our woods, I came upon the fresh, blood-red skeleton of an 8-point buck in a circle of hair and paw prints.
We had heard the excited yips of a pack of coyotes during the night a week before that, but didn’t realize how close to our house they were or what the ruckus actually meant. We’ve heard similar howling packs over the years since, sometimes triggered by an emergency vehicle siren, but haven’t come upon any similarly obvious evidence on our land like that carcass.
A stray bone is not uncommon, though.
Cyndie recently trained me in recognizing the invasive garlic mustard plant she has worked for years to disrupt, and we spent some time during an afternoon last week pulling sprouts in the areas off-trail that are less obvious. I found it a little overwhelming because it seems to be everywhere. We did what we could until my ability to cope was exhausted.
I can see why she just makes it a habit to pull whatever catches her eye when on our walks. She stuffs her pockets with plastic shopping bags to always have a way to bag and dispose of what she pulls up, an essential step in eradicating the highly destructive invasive.
There was a tiny oak sprout that caught my attention, barely tall enough to stand above the dead leaf blanket covering the ground in November. The leaves were so perfect. Apparently, too young to keep up with all the bigger trees that have the fall routine figured out.
It looks like today’s precipitation is sliding to our south, which is both good and bad. It’s nice that the horses will get a break from needing to deal with wetness in these cold temperatures. Their natural winter coats are coming in nicely, but their shaggy look quickly flattens out in the rain or wet snow.
The bad part of missing out on some rain or snow is that Paddock Lake is dry and will make for lousy skating this year. The residual growth was almost fluorescent green in the low spots.
My footprint was a result of retrieving the horses’ Jolly Ball that had rolled into the middle of the muddy remains of the “lake.” It’s always interesting to find the ball has been relocated from the spots where I place it, handle up, in hopes of enticing them to play.
We rarely have the privilege of catching them in the act. Occasionally, the ball disappears from the paddock. When it happened one time when the hay field grass was tall, we didn’t find it until the hay mower had sliced into it.
Fourteen Novembers of wonder and joy.
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Just Me
Starting today and lasting for a little over a week, it’s going to be just me managing the ranch as Cyndie is flying today to visit her mother in Florida. I’ve been through this solo routine many times but instead of that making it easier, I think the last few times have increasingly revealed how connected Cyndie and I have become at this point of our lives.
Throughout the last week, we have been watching the athletic Olympic performances available on NBC together. It won’t be the same all by myself. I have been frustrated over the number of events, especially hockey, we haven’t had access to that have been broadcast on USA network.
I will particularly miss her editing service for these blog posts. She continually provides helpful feedback on my writing that always makes my posts read better.
Tending to the animals is always half as much work when we share the duties. Now I only have Delilah to help me with the horses until Cyndie returns and what Delilah does down at the barn is never really all that helpful. Mostly, she starts barking a lot if she thinks the horses are misbehaving.
Delilah did a great job of alerting us about someone showing up at our front door yesterday. It was one of the local coyote hunters asking if they could cross our land during a hunt. I made sure to get his contact information this time, in case we have future evidence of the pests lurking on our land.
Surprisingly, Delilah didn’t get riled up over the sound of the hunting dogs cutting through our woods. Later, when I took her for an afternoon walk, she was very interested in all the new foot and paw prints in the snow. I heard a couple of gunshots while the hunt was active, but did not receive any word about whether they were successful or not.
It just eventually gets quiet, the pickup trucks disappear from the road, and the horses stop looking all spooked. At that point, I feel safe to take Delilah outside again.
Now it’s going to be quiet around the house for the next nine days.
Not that I’m counting.
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Circumstantial Evidence
We think we know what happened, but we have no proof. Today’s tale (no pun intended) needs to begin with a preamble that will put readers in a similar state of mind to the one I was in when I arrived at the shocking scene.
It was yesterday morning and I was walking Delilah like any other day. She sniffed at the typical spots and paused to take care of nature’s call twice, per usual. Our intermediate destination was the barn, to feed and clean up after horses, so I encouraged Delilah to turn onto the trail that most quickly brought us to the path around the back pasture.
Before we reached the last turn towards the barn, Delilah startled me with an immediate lunge off the path and made three strong leaps into a thick bramble of raspberry stalks and small trees before I could lock her leash and halt her progress. Every indication from her body told me there was a critter in the vicinity as she held her “High Alert!” stance and strained against the leash.
I froze with her and did my darndest to see any hint of movement from an animal intent on escape. Nothing. It wasn’t the first time she had what I consider to be a false alarm, so I pulled her back out of there and we continued toward the barn with both of us keeping a keen eye on the trees to our left for any movement.
It was while relocating equine fecal matter that I came upon the unsettling find.
There was a large chunk of hair matching the color of Swing’s tail laying in the snow. I immediately got Cyndie’s attention and she reacted with a level of shock that aligned with my concern. Upon finding footprints in the snow by the manure pile, I told Cyndie about Delilah’s behavior just around the corner by the back pasture.
It was adding up to an image of coyote activity to us. We immediately checked Swings over for any evidence of confrontation beyond the chunk of missing tail. Nothing.
However, based on the evidence thus far, I decided to take Delilah back out and let her pursue through the trees whatever it was she sensed from before. That quickly led to another finding, uncomfortably in plain view of our house.
If you can discern what that image above is showing, you will notice an impression in the snow where an animal curled up and laid long enough to melt a little bowl, just like deer leave behind, except there were no hoof prints around. Only paw prints. And there wasn’t just the one melted circle. There were clearly two on top of the knoll and possibly two others, less defined, to the side in the trees.
That is definitely what Delilah had smelled, but the culprits had long since moved on before we passed by the first time in the early light of dawn.
Just to add an exclamation point to the drama, last night after dinner, I called Cyndie over to ask if she could hear something outside. Was it a siren in the distance or yipping coyotes? She opened the door and confirmed, “Coyotes!”
“And they are close!”
What do you think? Did a coyote take a chomp of Swings’ tail Wednesday night?
I hope at least one of them has a black eye from the impact of a hoof.
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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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Today’s Lesson
Today, Cyndie and I are trying to process what lesson we might learn from the ultimate demise of our entire brood of 14 chickens over a span of two weeks when previous years have allowed us so much more time. Whether the most likely threat was coyotes or possibly hawks, we feel completely outsmarted and helpless against these forces of nature.
Yesterday, when the last four birds were taken from us, a leftover pile of feathers in the middle of our back yard, just steps away from where I was obliviously lounging on a recliner beside the fireplace, provided a particularly harsh stab of our inability to protect them.
Should we have changed something about our routine after the first attack? After the second?
It’s a moot point now. Except, there remains the probability we won’t give up trying. After the second attack, Cyndie decided to order an incubator to hatch some of our own eggs. If predators are going to keep taking our birds, we might end up just raising even more.
Evidence pointed to the latest attack playing out in uncomfortably close proximity to the horses whom we are striving to make feel safe and welcome. For now, our focus of attention shifts much more in their direction.
They provide both solace and distraction from our grief over the decimation of the chickens. We are learning how to frame our recent experience losing chickens and trying to soothe the angst of relocated rescue Thoroughbreds.
It may be today’s lesson, but I sense it is going to take a lot more time than a single day to fully absorb.
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Hunting Hounds
On a thickly gray Saturday morning, we stepped out of the house behind Delilah and quickly noticed a sharp sound in the distance. Swallowed by the crunch of our boots on the snowy path, the muffle of hats over ears, and the sound of our own voices as we chatted about some minutia, we had to stop in our tracks to identify what we were hearing.
There was a helicopter far in the distance, but that sound just faded. After a moment of no sounds, there was the bark of a dog. Then, several more. The hunting hounds were out early.
We resumed our trek down the trail, but not for long. The echoing bellows were only getting louder, so we reversed direction and headed back toward the house, through the back yard, and on to the barn. Delilah was delighted with the added excitement and romped her way along with us, reversing direction only several times to see if we couldn’t just check on the vocal hounds in the woods.
I wondered if we might suddenly see coyotes sprinting past us in a run for their lives.
With Delilah secured in the barn, Cyndie and I tended to the tasks of setting out food for the chickens and opening the coop. I could see the trucks of hunters slowing moving by on the road while we mingled with the chickens and I cleaned off the poop board. Rocky made a failed attempt to mount one of the Domestiques. We took solace in his acceptance of her objections.
Cyndie continues to offer feed from her bare hand in effort to condition the flock to always accept humans as safe and valuable companions. With respect to the New Hampshire pullet, Cyndie got nipped as the overzealous girl went after a mole on her thumb.
Can’t fault that as malicious, but geez. That hurt.
Returning to the barn, Delilah bursts forth with excitement at this moment because she knows the next phase of this daily routine is to take her up to the house where she will receive her morning meal. We exit the barn door and while I am closing the door behind us I notice Cyndie struggling with everything she’s got to hold the leash.
Delilah is trying to drag Cyndie up to the driveway to where a cute looking hunting beagle is standing all alone.
We decide to let Cyndie take Delilah back into the barn for a bit while I see if I can coax the beagle to get back on the job and find the rest of his pack or the scent of a coyote.
Knowing the hunters were driving nearby, I walked with the happy radio-collared beagle toward the road. A truck pulled up just as we arrived. The hunter said she was one of two that had gone astray.
Meanwhile, Cyndie took the opportunity to pop out of the barn and head up to the house with Delilah on a short leash. They quickly were surprised by the other stray. This time, Delilah was in reach to make contact, and luckily, with wagging tails the dogs met gently, nose to nose.
Cyndie said she offered Delilah the deal of continuing up to the house for her breakfast, and the two dogs trotted together for a bit and then parted without incident as they reached the door.
The hunter I spoke with at the road said our neighbor had alerted them to a sighting of coyotes early this morning, so they were hopefully tracking a fresh scent. By the time we were having our breakfast, nothing but quiet had settled in around us. I’m guessing the trail was lost.
Subsequent calm and quiet was a welcome outcome after the adventurous start to our Saturday.
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Main Topics
There are two primary topics dominating life around Wintervale lately: chickens and baking. Each having nothing to do with the other.
Last night it was all baking.
Super-sized apple cider oatmeal chocolate chip cookies and strawberry hand-pies custom ordered by the berry farm.
I contributed to the best of my ability. They both tasted delicious.
This morning, the chickens will get our main attention.
I suppose the dog and cat are feeling a little left out of things. Pequenita has been relentless at seeking attention whenever I venture near the bedroom –our bed being her preferred domain. Delilah will get some extra adventure later today when I take her exploring off-trails in our woods looking for evidence related to the raucous coyote howling we endured Wednesday night/Thursday morning.
I’m hoping that pack of predators are all well-fed now and won’t have any reason to hang around our property on the very day we plan to let our chickens get their first taste of free-ranging.
It all serves as a reminder we are living the country life.
I guess the two main topics could better be labeled, baking and pets.
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Wild Turkeys
Something tells me the local flock of turkeys has expanded in size since I last saw them. It’s been a while. I’m guessing there is an added generation running with them at this point. Yesterday, while mowing the lawn, I spotted over 15 of them strolling through the labyrinth. I couldn’t count them all.
I was a bit surprised they didn’t startle over the loud roar of the mower when I approached. They simply walked, pretty much in single file, into the shadows of the trees.
We frequently find dropped feathers and plenty of footprints, but more often than not, they keep themselves out of sight.
It’s exciting to be able to see them looking so comfortable on our property. Thinking about it, maybe the good fortune we’ve had with our 8 chickens surviving all summer is reflected in the large number of wild turkeys also surviving. The predators must be finding other sources of sustenance.
I don’t know what the coyotes in the area have been eating, but they’ve been rather vocal in the wee hours of darkness recently. Apparently, it’s not turkeys sleeping up in the trees at night.
Maybe the coyotes will help me out and eliminate that nuisance woodchuck that has been burrowing around here lately.
It’s wild out there!
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Reclaiming Peace
The days following a disruptive weather event can be a confusing mix, emotionally. The threat has lifted and calm ensues, but the anxiety adrenaline hangover lingers. We are lucky to have dodged any significant damage or loss of power, but the multiple inches of dirty snow/slush, speckled with innumerable broken branches, delay the feeling of relief we seek.
Thank goodness for our hills and valleys that break up the wind around here.
The open terrain to the west didn’t protect the overexposed, iced up power poles lining roadways.
We don’t have anything near that level of clean up facing us. That must have been a real shocker to come upon.
Some of the local hunters stopped by for permission to cross our property with their dogs in search of coyotes. A short time later, gunshots rang out.
I had watched as the group of hounds calmly traveled out of the neighboring corn field and into the woods, with a single hunter walking behind them. After they disappeared into the ravine beyond our property, we never saw another glimpse of them.
One of these days, I’m going to ask if I can tag along. It occurred to me yesterday, that in all our years here, I have never actually seen a coyote. I’m curious about the logistics of how they finally get proximity to shoot, and then how they find their way out of the woods while carrying their kill.
In less than three weeks, our annual participation in the World Labyrinth Day peace walk will be upon us. We are finding it difficult to envision how we might be ready.
It’s not just the peace pole that can’t stand up in the soft earth. The stones balanced at each turn spend more time toppled that upright with all the freezing and thawing going on.
Our exercise may just be to claim our peace with accepting things just as they are.
Windy, calm; wet, or dry.
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New Data
Upon further review, judges have amended the egg count total for Tuesday. Yesterday, I reported that Cyndie found six eggs. Last night she updated the count.
Turns out, Jackie had collected 2 eggs herself that day. The total has increased to 8!
So, there.
With all the news frantically shouting about the hurricane bearing down on the US east coast, those of us in the middle of the continent are enjoying very summer-like conditions. My drive home yesterday brought me through fields that are changing from the deep green of summer to hues of yellow and gold.
Navigating my way around the house in the mornings before work has returned to the dark ages, and the hour of closing the chicken coop at night has moved up to around 7:30 p.m., about an hour and a half earlier than just a short while ago.
Last night, a pack of coyotes whooped it up somewhere within hearing distance of our windows. It sounded very similar to the group yelping we heard the first year we moved here, after which we discovered the carcass of the 8-point buck in our woods.
The change of seasons makes life feel more adventurous. It’s adventure that I greatly prefer, compared to an ominous threat of once-in-a-lifetime, climate-change-amplified hurricanes looming large.
Counting my blessings while I have the luxury, and sending love to those facing the challenges of preparations for evacuations, wind damage, and flooding.
Hold on to your hats.
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Relative Something 