They’re BAAAAAAACK (Prey Animal Strategy)

Right before bed, I decided to go out and check on the goats one more time, on the off-chance that mama Clio had found her babies. I was fairly certain coyotes had dragged them off, since two hours of me and Clio both searching for them this afternoon, Clio yelling her head off the whole time,  had yielded nothing. But there they were, like nothing ever happened. Just two sassy little baby goats without a care in the world. 

Im so relieved. I had been so sad, so angry at myself for putting them back in the big pasture, and so disappointed. I scooped them both up and took a selfie to send to Paloma, who was just as sad as I was about it. Then I dragged them all back into the backyard, where they will stay with the chickens until the babies are big enough to run fast. 

Baby goats hide while their mothers go off and eat. Just like baby deer do, and probably lots of other baby prey animals. And they are really, really good at hiding. It’s their only chance at survival - they have no other defense. Of course know that baby goats are good hiders, and for two hours today I assumed that’s what they were doing. But when their own mother was running around panicked, yelling and searching, I got worried. I thought they would answer her if they were there. But I guess as long as they don’t feel safe, they will stay quiet and immobile. And in four acres of chest high grass, there was no way we were going to find them if they didn’t make a noise. 

Phew. I’m wrung out. I’m gonna take a bath. 

The End, I Think

I’m done. Lost TWO more baby goats today, presumably to coyotes. I came home from work and Clio’s twins are gone. They were born just a week ago, and Clio, a first freshener,  was a great mama goat. She’s been yelling and yelling for them for the last hour, following me around as I walked the pasture. 

Coyotes have gotten four out of six babies born this year. This is the first year they’ve ever bothered the goats, been here fifteen years and never had an issue before. Must be a new pack with different hunting habits. But I’m just totally demoralized. I don’t want to have goats anymore.

Between worms, coccidia, and coyotes, I just can’t. My heart can’t take it anymore. 

Another One for the Coyotes (Attempts at Fence-Fixing)

Ever since the coyotes took Cosmos from the main barn during the night, we’ve been locking up the two remaining babies in the smaller, secure mama barn at night. We have to lock them up fairly late, unless we want to get up at the crack of dawn to milk the mamas. We go out after sundown but before full dark, which this time of year is about 8:30-8:45. 

Two nights ago When Paloma went out to get them, Gingersnap was missing. They coyotes got her while it was still light out. They are incredibly bold. I thought they babies would be safe during the daylight hours, but I guess I thought wrong. I really am just about out of ideas. Almost everybody I talk to agrees there is really no long term solution for coyotes - if you shoot them, they just have a bigger litter next year. Total eradication of a pack - if that’s even possible - will only create a temporary vacuum for a new pack to move  into. They are smart animals, tough and persistent. 

The hole under the fence has been patched, with an ad-hoc and frankly rather embarrassing mishmash of materials that Homero cobbled  together. We had a large number of wooden stakes, which he used to tack down the field fencing by stapling the lower wire to the stakes and then pounding them into the ground. The big hole was blocked with some concrete cylinders that have been lying along the back acre since we bought the place. It will do for now. 

In this picture you can see how much acreage our neighbors to the west have. It’s about 300, give or take, and it has fields and forest and streams. It’s absolutely teeming with coyotes. When I complained about the problem on Facebook a few hunters contacted me and offered to help me out, so I may ask the neighbor’s  permission to let a couple hunters try and pick off the boldest ones. It may discourage them for a while. Especially if, as has been suggested, we leave a carcass hanging to rot on the fence where they normally come in. 

As I was walking the pasture that evening looking for signs of Gingersnap, I could hear the coyotes howling and  yippi-ki-yaying back in the woods. It sounded like a pretty fair number. “They’re fucking celebrating over my poor Gingersnap,”  I thought, filled with thirst for revenge. 

But the next day at church, we read psalm 148, which reads in part “praise the Lord from the earth, you sea monsters and all you deeps; fire and hail, snow and fog, tempestuous winds, doing God’s will; mountains and all hills, fruit trees and all cedars; wild beasts and all cattle….sing praise.” And I remembered the coyote song and thought to myself  “I may be upset, I may be sad, but the coyotes are praising the Lord.” 

Coyote Blues (Adios Cosmos)

I thought we were going to have a great year for baby goats. Last year was just terrible, we lost three out of four babies. But this year, so far, was shaping up to be great. Two out of three mamas have given birth, without issues, to a healthy single doeling and to a pair of healthy twins, a buck and a doe. 

The buckling is -was - this beautiful fellow here. As adorable as he was, for some reason his mama took a dislike to him and rejected him. But he took to a bottle with no trouble at all and was thriving. Like all bottle babies, he became very friendly and would run up to us as soon as we appeared. After a week or so, his mama (Bitsy) decided he wasn’t so bad after all and let him nurse again. He was just entering maximum cuteness phase, that’s probably why :) 

Because of his flashy coloring, there was a lot of interest in him and I actually managed to sell him for the very decent price of $200. A neighbor wanted him for her new herd sire. He would have made a very handsome buck, for sure. He was going to look just like his papa, Jupiter. We named him Cosmos. All our bucks have weather or atmospheric or space related names. 

But alas, it was not to be. Day before yesterday when we went out to do morning chores he was just missing. The other babies were there but Cosmos wasn’t. We searched the whole pasture but he was totally gone. We didn’t find any signs of him - not hide nor hair nor bloody patch of grass. What we did find were fresh tracks in the muddy area under the fence on the western side of the pasture where the coyotes come in. 

Damn coyotes. They have eaten well from our farm over the years. Never before have we lost a goat, though, only poultry. But we lose at least half our flock every damn winter. This winter we were down to a single chicken when we decided to just move the poor thing into a shelter inside  the fenced backyard; the coyotes wouldn’t dare come right up to the house like that. So we built a new coop and got a few more hens to be her companions and we haven’t lost a chicken since. 

If I had put any thought into it, it might have occurred to me that without any chickens to eat, the coyotes might not just shrug their metaphorical shoulders and move on. That they might, in fact, decide hey, we’re here anyway, might as well try out baby goat. 

For now, we are just locking up the babies at night. Hopefully before long they will be too big for the coyotes. I’m not sure what to do about it long term. We can patch one spot in the fence - though it would not be easy to get enough gravel or cement through the pasture to the site - but the coyotes could and would just dig a new hole. Considering that there’s 1000 linear feet of fence line it doesn’t seem likely that we are going to successfully fence them out. 

Opinions are mixed on the effectiveness of shooting them (we don’t have a rifle anyways). Most sources suggest that’s it’s a very temporary solution at best. There just doesn’t seem to be a great solution. Keeping the goats locked up at night is probably as good as we are going to get. And that’s problematic as well because it increases the chores exponentially. It decreases the time they can spend on pasture, thereby necessitating more hay,  and it drastically increases the amount of poop in the barn. 

Losing this baby hurt. He was gorgeous and sweet. I thought they were all going to live this year. It’s a gut punch. And, I’m not going to lie, it wasn’t any fun to give back that $200, either. 

Attempting Chickens Again (Hammer and Crime)

Every winter, we lose most of our poultry to coyotes. This is, of course, mostly our own fault. Our chicken coop is hardly worthy of the name - it’s just a rickety collection of random boards nailed up between our two small barns, with chicken wire tacked on and roofed with corrugated plastic, which is cracked and broken. I haven’t the heart to keep the chickens penned up in there. The barns have no gutters, so the rain sheets off the roofs and pools in the coop. Eight months of the year it’s just a mud puddle. They do have nest boxes and a couple of dowels to roost on up off the floor, but they don’t really like it in there and I don’t blame them. 

So the chickens and turkeys are fully free-range. They mostly roost in the hayloft of the main barn, which would be fine except for the fact that it ruins the hay. And except for the fact that the main barn apparently does not protect them from predators one little bit. Over the years, we have clearly become known far and wide as “easy pickin’s farm” with the local coyote population. Our property is only five acres, but it abuts some two hundred acres of woods and fields, and there is a whole mess of coyotes in there. 

I’ve pretty much given up on raising turkeys, because they are expensive and ticklish to raise, and it’s just too disheartening to spend a few hundred dollars and several months nurturing poults into big, fat, profitable birds, only to have them disappear just as they hit market weight, leaving behind only a patch of scattered feathers somewhere out in the field. I was close to ready to give up on chickens too, when we were down to a last solitary bird. I wanted to give the poor bedraggled thing away to somebody with a real chicken coop, but Paloma cajoled me into getting four new chickens instead. 

It was obvious we needed a better chicken situation. Either we had to repair the coop in a serious way, or make something new closer to the house where the coyotes wouldn’t come. For a while we toyed with the former, but settled on the latter solution as being both cheaper and less work. These are our prime considerations in most cases. We have a very well-fenced back yard, and it has a chain link dog run in it. We haven’t used this dog run for anything in particular in many years. I don’t even remember where it came from. But it makes a serviceable chicken coop when roofed with cattle panels bent into hoops and then covered with a tarp. 

I found four young rhode island red hens for sale and put them in the new coop along with the one surviving yellow hen. It took them a week or so so settle in and start laying, but now they are happy and healthy and popping out eggs just like they ought to. The downside is the back yard looks like hell - grass all scratched up and porch covered in bird poop - but oh well. What’s that saying? You can’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs? 

Paloma named the chickens according to some secret logic of her own. She claims to be able to tell them all apart except two. The two she can’t tell apart she named Thunder and Lightening. The other three are Banka, Hammer, and Crime. I think Hammer and Crime sounds like the name of a rap duo from the late eighties. 

We had planned to get some fancy, colorful bantams as well, but I don’t know. Maybe five is enough chickens. It’s certainly better than just one. 

Turkey Tale and Maybe Bears

These are our new turkeys. A neighbor was selling off her entire menagerie, and we got these pretty mixed breed ladies. She said they were layers, and went broody, but they haven’t laid any eggs here yet. They spent the first couple weeks locked up in the coop, and then we let them out into the barnyard. I always prefer to let my poultry free range if possible. 

It isn’t possible, however, with Haku around. The very first morning they were out, he chased them and scared them, and they flew away over to the neighbor’s property. I really don’t know what I’m going to do about that dog. We’ve had turkeys and chickens for years, and he’d gotten quite good about not chasing them, but we haven’t had any poultry in about six months, and I guess he “forgot.” I’m very worried about the future baby goats. That, however, is a worry for another day - a day about six weeks off. 

The turkeys spent two nights roosting in a horse chestnut tree on the fence line between the neighbor’s yard and Homero’s shop. We put out food for them, but when we approached, they retreated. They are good fliers. There wasn’t much we could do except wait and hope that they’d come back on their own. I wasn’t sure if they’d been here long enough to think of this place as home, but apparently so, because this morning they were back in the barnyard. 

We still haven’t been able to catch them and get them back into the coop, though. We’ll wait for dusk and hope they roost in the barn, then we can sneak up on them. I found a Tom turkey for sale nearby, and I’m going to get him tomorrow. If their former owner was telling me true, maybe they will hatch chicks this summer. That would be cool. 

While we were beating about the bushes along the fence line, Homero found something odd in an inaccessible corner. A sturdy cattle panel - heavy gauge! - has been severely bent, wrenched up off the ground more than two feet, making a big gap. It looks like it got hit by a car, but there’s no access for any vehicle - it’s deep in the brush.   

Last summer, while we were in Mexico, a friend of mine was coming by three times a week to make sure everyone had water and to enjoy the cherries and plums that we were missing out on. She told me she saw bear-scat a couple of separate times. Normally I’d be skeptical, but this particular friend grew up in the Yukon, and she knows bear scat. Also, there were multiple sighting of a young black bear within a couple of miles of our place. Maybe this is how the bear got through the fence. I really don’t know what else might have done it. I would have guessed a bear would go over a fence, not under it, but what do I know about bears? Not much. 

Haku, meanwhile, is on house arrest. 

Predator Problems Redux (Coyote Edition)

We always lose chickens over the winter. Always. Some years are worse than others, but on average I'd say we have about a 30% chicken attrition situation over any given winter. And some years are just terrible. This year has been a bad one so far. 

We started the fall with eleven hens. Now we have five. It's especially annoying because these hens were youthful and excellent layers. Golden sex-links that I bought in spring as pullets. This was their first laying year, and they provided us with a surfeit of delicious eggs. The second year of a hen's life is generally her most prolific, and the third and fourth years are also excellent. I was looking forward to several seasons of eggy abundance. 

We've known for some time that we have a coyote problem here.  I have seen them, in broad daylight, in the neighbor's field, and we hear them  singing on moonlight summer nights. In general, I appreciate coyotes as a savvy, adaptable animal. They are handsome too, no matter what their detractors say, with their sandy brown coats and their sly, intelligent faces. Losing a chicken here and there is the price we pay for living in this lovely rural area. I'd be sad indeed to never hear coyote song again. 

But I do draw the line at the loss of more than half our flock, and it's barely November yet. And yesterday they took a turkey - a well grown hen, who was already sold at $4/lb. Now I have to call a customer and tell  them their family will be eating store-bought turkey this thanksgiving, and that makes me mad. 

So it was with mixed emotions at best that I regarded the dead coyote that my husband brought me last week. As he was driving home in the dusky evening, he saw a coyote lying on the side of the highway just off our property; the same place that our dog Haku was hit last summer. The coyote was perfect, intact. So much so that Homero approached it cautiously in case it might actually be still alive. It wasn't, but it wasn't long dead either. Still warm. 

Homero dragged it off the verge of the highway and well into our property, for no particularly good reason. "I didn't want it to get run over into mush," he said. "Come look." 

Not having ever been close enough to a coyote to touch one before, I didn't have much of a frame of reference. Local farmers tend to greatly exaggerate the size and menace of coyotes, claiming they are larger than dogs and can drag off full grown sheep. I know that is bull-puckey. Coyotes seldom weigh more than forty pounds, and are quite a bit smaller than your average German Shepherd. This one seemed to weigh about thirty-five pounds, and was female. 

There wasn't a mark on her, apart from a little blood around her muzzle. It's been a cold fall, and her coat was thick and soft. I felt quite sorry for her. I imagined her as one of the pups I'd heard singing earlier, in summer, and that her dan had taught her where to go hunting. She probably knew us as "easy pickings farm." Nice fat chickens, if you can get across the road, look out, it's a bitch. 

Another nice thing about living in a rural area in the age of the internet: it was quite easy to find somebody who wanted to pick her up for her hide. I mean, why not, might as well salvage something beautiful from this disaster. We've lost good poultry and an intelligent animal list her life in her prime, but why shouldn't somebody salvage a nice fur? 

Homero tells me he's absolutely positively guaranteed going to patch up the chicken coop before it gets much colder. I say - as I say every year - that we won't get any more birds of any sort until he does. I know what will happen- the earth will turn and spring will come. Chicks will show up for sale under heat lamps in the farm store. We will look at our sad skinny chickens who survived winter and decide they need an infusion of new blood. We will think we have all summer long to fix the chicken coop.