Scary Birds, Scary Eggs

The turkeys have finally started laying. I guess it took them a long time to settle down, after their repeated escapes and the traumatic process of catching them - traumatic for both the birds and for us. These mixed-breed birds are large, strong, excellent flyers, and very wild. I sustained several nasty scratches trying to catch them, including a six inch one across my cheek and jaw that I thought was going to scar. 

Which explains why, when I saw the eggs, I went back to the house for reinforcements in the form of Paloma and a kitchen broom. I made her stand at the entrance to coop and distract the turkeys with jabbing motions and loud gobbles, while I collected the eggs. It involved a certain amount of kicking, but we made it back to the house with the eggs intact and without letting the turkeys escape again. 

Hopefully, the turkeys will hatch it chicks this year, but so far I haven’t seen the Tom turkey do anything resembling an attempt to mate. When I open these eggs, I ought to be able to tell if they are fertilized or not. If so, I’ll leave future nests alone until I can tell if a hen is brooding them. If they aren’t fertilized, we’ll eat them. 

Paloma isn’t thrilled about that. I told her turkey eggs taste just like chicken eggs and once they are scrambled she won’t be able to tell the difference, but I don’t really know if that’s true. 

Guess we’ll find out! 

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. 

 

Baby Birds (Wild and Tame)

My property is apparently the perfect habitat for killdeer.  I love these handsome, graceful birds, with their piercing calls and their swift, low flights across the fields in the twilight. They show up every year in February, and begin a months-long process of finding a mate and rearing young. They like to nest in flat, open, gravelly areas. For two years running, a pair of killdeer has chosen to nest in my sacrifice area, where I keep the horses. It has been delightful to watch the devoted pair incubating eggs - both male and female sit on eggs, and take turns guarding the nest - and especially delightful to see the tiny babies hatch. 

Killdeer babies are identical to the adults, but smaller, about the size of a golf ball. As soon as they hatch, they begin to run about, with that peculiar killdeer habit of running in short, straight lines and stopping abruptly, as though by a traffic light. The parents stand nearby, watching and, if anyone comes too close, pretending to be injured, dragging themselves athletically about and screaming, to distract a potential predator from their young. 

The nest in the horse pasture hatched out about three weeks ago, and the babies are already half the size of the parents. There were four eggs, but only three juveniles. However, there is another nest now. A pair got started late, I guess. This new mama found herself a supremely unsuitable nest site - right smack dab in the middle of my driveway (see above). When one of my broody hens nests in a poorly chosen site, I wait for dark and then move her, eggs and all, to a site of my choosing. Obviously I can't do that with a wild bird. The girls set up barricades made of pallets, instead. Luckily, killdeer are not much frightened by bustle and hubbub. Even when we (carefully and slowly) drive right by the nest, the parent bird only moves away a few feet, and then returns immediately.  I am looking forward to observing this new family. 

This year, we ordered 8 turkey poults. Turkeys are one of the more profitable animals on the farm - if I can keep them alive until Thanksgiving, and grow them out to a respectable weight, I can sell them for $4/lb, which means each bird is worth somewhere between $50 and $75. These poults, broad breasted bronzes, cost $6.50 apiece. 

Because I belong to the Gleaner's Pantry , I can feed them very cheaply indeed. I always start them off on expensive Game Bird food, but soon enough they can eat scraps, bread, and get out on pasture to forage. Last year, we lost two full grown birds to coyotes, which was a blow, but even so, the entire turkey operation turned a profit, and provided us with our own bird for the holiday. This year, we will have to repair the fences and make an effort to keep the predators away. On each bird that I raise to full weight, I can expect to make a minimum $40 profit. 

That's better than I can expect on a goat kid! 

Predator Problems (Facebook Farmers)

Last year, we had good luck with turkeys. We never intended to raise turkeys, but a trade came our way (Turkey Trade) and we acquired four half-grown turkeys in exchange for one goat. We ate one, sold two, and donated one to the food bank. I decided pastured turkeys were a great return on investment - and also extremely delicious - so this past spring we upped our investment by 50% and bought six Standard Bronze poults.

All went well until just a few weeks ago - the turkeys all grew quickly and turned into handsome animals of about fifteen or eighteen pounds. I think they were all hens, although I wouldn't swear to that on a stack of bibles. Through Craigslist and Facebook, I had already sold four of them. But then one of them disappeared. There was no sign of "fowl play" (ha ha) - no feathers or blood. There was simply one less turkey.

My Facebook Farmer's group informed me that turkeys are known to wander. In fact, our turkeys had wandered over to the neighbor's a couple of times and had to be retrieved. But they had wandered as a group. Turkeys, at least mine, tend to stay in a pretty tight formation, and I thought it was unlikely that a single turkey had decided to strike out on his/her own.

Then, two weeks later, boom - another disappearance. Same modus operendi - simple vanishing, without a trace of violence. Once again, I went back to my Facebook Farmers. I suggested a coyote, as being the only local predator I knew of capable of carrying off a twenty-pound animal. Plenty of people responded, but with varying opinions - some people agreed that coyotes were a likely culprit, but others said that they would leave a big mess of feathers and blood. Somebody suggested bald eagles, which I discounted not because I think an eagle incapable, but because the turkeys disappeared at night. Again I heard that turkeys wander and I ought to check with the neighbors. And, as always, several people voiced the opinion that humans were stealing my turkeys.

Every time that someone in the group posts that anything has gone missing - apples off a tree, baby chicks, tame rabbits, pumpkins off a porch - the assertion surfaces that it was stolen by people. Personally, I find the idea that hordes of my neighbors are prowling through the dark looking for vulnerable apple trees or sneaking into unsecured barns to steal chickens patently absurd. It's been my experience that my neighbors are far more likely to bring me produce or game meat than they are to take it away. As a matter of fact, in my entire lifetime, I think I have been the victim of burglary twice or  maybe three times, whereas I have been the recipient of totally unsolicited generosity hundreds of times.

So, I've learned a couple of things about my Facebook Farmer's group. Although a valuable resource for those who are willing to sift and verify, there is a lot of suspicion and ignorance. I could learn a lot more about the telltale signs of various predators from five minutes on the internet ( http://www.backyardchickens.com/t/18670/poultry-predator-identification, http://www.avianaquamiser.com/posts/What_killed_my_chicken__63__/) than by asking for advice form a random collection of farmers. Some of them are probably well-informed and right, but how could I tell which ones?

As it turns out, my initial suspicion about coyotes was almost certainly correct. Not only does my google search confirm that coyotes and foxes often carry off birds and leave little trace behind, returning again and again to the same place as long as birds remain vulnerable, but my neighbor (he of the hotel-sized-house, or the HSH) called me night before last to tell me that he had seen two big coyotes in my field, and has shot at them, but missed.  Furthermore, when I decided, yesterday, to walk the pasture in a grid pattern looking for evidence, I found one fresh, well shredded leg bone and a small neat pile of guts.

Clearly, my flock is not well protected. I never know exactly how many chickens I have at any given time, but today I made a point of counting, and there are fewer than there ought to be. And the ones that remain are looking thin and harassed. I think I have a pack of coyotes who have decided that my farm is their snack bar.

Normally, the poultry is locked in a coop at night, but lately I have been leaving them to roost in the open main barn instead. This is because the weather has been unrelentingly awful, raining like mad for a couple of weeks on end. The chicken coop, which is just the space between my two barns fenced off and roofed, has terrible drainage and right now it is just a sea of liquid mud. The chickens would be utterly miserable in there. There is not even any land dry enough to feed them on. They have roosts, of course, but they can't stay on them all day. In this weather it would be inhumane to keep them in the coop. Ducks, maybe.

But something needs to be done, clearly. If I do nothing, the coyotes will likely eat my entire flock this winter. As far as the turkeys go, I think I will probably just butcher them immediately - they are full sized - and keep them in the freezer instead of the barnyard. But I need to finger out how to secure the coop and make it habitable before I lose the rest of my chickens.