Once again, my timing is off.
All spring I've been taking pictures and videos of the fox kits out by the old barns.
So. Frickin. Cute.
Should have posted some a while ago. The posts would have written themselves, right?
At their peak, I counted 7 kits. Running and pouncing and wrestling with each other. Cue the flutes and whistles.
That was probably around the beginning of May.
As they got older I began to see them all the time. I couldn't walk outside without interrupting at least three or four. They were everywhere. Feasting on berries under the mulberry trees. Racing around the pasture. Darting in and out of the barns. I loved watching them.
They coexisted peacefully with the sheep. Each ignored the other. I started to believe that all would be fine.
Then life intervened for me and I lost track for a little while. By the time I tuned back in, the mood out by the barns had changed a bit.
I started finding...well, I won't even try to be delicate...I started finding body parts.
Everywhere.
At first the back half of a raccoon.
Then most of a second one.
Sometimes they'd be fresh and sometimes not.
A skunk.
A groundhog.
One was the entire wingspan of a chicken. Ugh. I had to run to the coop to count mine, who were thankfully all there.
Usually, the carcasses were just lying out on the ground by the old barns.
Sometimes, I'd see them first from a distance. That sucks, cause what if it's a cat or a lamb? I always have to go check them out to make sure.
Sometimes, I just stumble on them unexpectedly. Now that REALLY sucks, cause, well, lets just say, there are no flutes and whistles in the background when that happens.
The groundhog was left in a stall in the pony barn. Um, thanks?
My apprehension went up a serious notch when I went out to check on the sheep one afternoon and found Devon, one of my Icelandics, sitting in the back pasture with bloody, fly-covered wounds across her rump. Like she'd been pounced on by a fox. The attacker was nowhere to be seen and clearly hadn't followed through with its attack, considering Devon was still sitting there, calmly chewing her cud in a very lifelike manner. I took her back to the barn, cleaned her up, sprayed her for flies, and she was fine in a couple of days, but still. Still. A fox attacked a grown sheep.
I worried about the lambs.
Especially Hamza and Helenka, the two bottle babies. They don't have any adult sheep to look out for them, just each other, and they're not a lot bigger than the foxes.
I started thinking about encouraging the foxes to move on.
I struggled with that idea. From what I gather, baby foxes don't move out of the home den until fall and that's still several months off.
I didn't want to endanger them any more than I wanted to endanger the sheep.
I was still hoping for a Disney ending I guess.
Then I started to notice that the number of kits seemed to have declined. By the end of June I was seeing them much less frequently and I rarely saw more than two at a time. Maybe three.
A couple of days ago, I found, not one, but two different carcasses in the pony pens during morning rounds. They'd both been dead long enough that it was challenging to tell what they were. Raccoon? Groundhog? Fox?
I think they were foxes.
Sunday morning, mama fox (I'm pretty sure it was mama) got hit by a car on the road.
This afternoon I found yet another dead kit in the pasture.
Both yesterday and today, I saw only one fox each day.
Just one.
I wish there was something I could do to save this one, but nature clearly is taking its course.
It looks like I won't need to worry about chasing them away.
But, geez, this is not how I imagined this little adventure playing out.
Showing posts with label farmlife. Show all posts
Showing posts with label farmlife. Show all posts
Tuesday, July 5, 2016
Sunday, May 8, 2016
Worth the wait
March passed with no further fox sightings.
By April, I thought maybe they had moved on after all.
Recently though, I'd started to catch fleeting glimpses again. Usually just the swoosh of a small figure caught out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes dashing for the fence line at the back of the property. Sometimes dashing for the barn.
I wanted to get a picture, even a crummy one, but invariably my phone was dead, or I'd put it down somewhere, or my hands were full, or wet, or she was long gone by the time I got my phone free.
Last week I heard the screams again.
But wait, I say to myself.
I never saw the first litter. You can't be working on a second litter yet, Ms. Fox. Where is my first litter? Where is the litter playing in the spring sunshine? Where is that first litter I was promised?
Wikipedia promised me. The internet promised me.
I was a little disappointed.
Until this morning as I passed by the old barns to let the sheep out.
Hands free.
Phone charged.
And lookie there, it's not even mama fox, it's babies! At least three different kits.
In the spring sunshine.
Sparing you the worst of the phone photos, here are a few of one kit. You gotta look close at the last couple to see the tiny little guy.
By April, I thought maybe they had moved on after all.
Recently though, I'd started to catch fleeting glimpses again. Usually just the swoosh of a small figure caught out of the corner of my eye. Sometimes dashing for the fence line at the back of the property. Sometimes dashing for the barn.
I wanted to get a picture, even a crummy one, but invariably my phone was dead, or I'd put it down somewhere, or my hands were full, or wet, or she was long gone by the time I got my phone free.
Last week I heard the screams again.
But wait, I say to myself.
I never saw the first litter. You can't be working on a second litter yet, Ms. Fox. Where is my first litter? Where is the litter playing in the spring sunshine? Where is that first litter I was promised?
Wikipedia promised me. The internet promised me.
I was a little disappointed.
Until this morning as I passed by the old barns to let the sheep out.
Hands free.
Phone charged.
And lookie there, it's not even mama fox, it's babies! At least three different kits.
In the spring sunshine.
Sparing you the worst of the phone photos, here are a few of one kit. You gotta look close at the last couple to see the tiny little guy.
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Life lessons or . . . Never wrestle a goat
Goats can be hard to contain.
Recently, as the long indoor barn season started to wind down, Cal and Eamon, our two bucks, decided they'd had enough of their stall and took to going over its walls every day.
For lack of a better solution, I took to stalling them in the pen under the stairs to the loft. They didn't really like that and before too long they'd worked out, like Woody, the pen's previous inhabitant, how to get out of the pen, up the stairs and into the loft itself. When Woody first tried this trick, I worried about leaving him up there, but he seemed pretty content and could go up and down at will, so I left him to it. Same thing with Eamon. The most recent addition to the pen, Cal, also figured out pretty quickly how to go up, but unlike Woody and Eamon, was unclear how to come down. I guess the stairs are steep and a little intimidating. Anyway, I noticed over the weekend that Cal was doing a lot of whining at mealtime (not unusual), from up in the loft (a bit unusual), but not actually coming down to eat (very unusual). The notion of a goat unable to traverse stairs seemed unthinkable, so I didn't think about it too much. Until Sunday night when I went out to do the last feeding and checking and tucking in and Cal was still up in the loft and as far as I could tell had not come down all weekend.
Sigh.
I couldn''t leave him there right?
So I went up to get him.
Lesson number 1: Never wrestle a goat.
At this point, let me point out that Cal is a big, spectacular Pygora buck who weighs, at minimium, 120 pounds and sports a very impressive set of pointy horns at least 2 feet across tip to tip. They make pretty good handles, as long as you hold on tight. Cal also has the sweetest personality ever bestowed on a goat of either gender, so I thought nothing of going up to lead him down myself if need be. What are those horns for after all?
Lesson number 2: Never wrestle a goat on stairs.
We shouldn't have to learn this lesson, right? It should come for free.
I climbed the stairs that are wedged tightly into the corner of the first stall. Did I mention they're pretty steep? And there's no rail of any sort. It's a barn after all. At the bottom of the stairs is a tight little turn in front of the hard oak kickboards of the barn wall. At the top of the stairs was Cal, watching me with a worried little look on his beautiful goat face. I climbed high enough to talk to him, face to face, eye to eye, but even with my encouragement, he was adament. No stairs. I took a deep breathe to clear my late night sleepy brain and thought, "Ok, horns it is. Let's get this done."
I grabbed hold and gave a gentle pull.
No go.
I pulled again.
He put a tentative hoof down a step and stopped.
I set my feet firmly. Yes, I clearly remember thinking, "Get a good foothold," and pulled harder.
He put a second hoof down on the steps.
I must have encouraged him to continue with another tug. Such good horns.
He started to scrabble on the boards.
I stopped pulling.
He started falling.
I pulled up now, instead of down.
Yeah, that's right, at this point I'm still thinking "I can control this."
Ha, I can no more control the descent of 120 pounds of flailing goat from ten feet in the air, than I can fly.
Though fly we did, in a manner of speaking. Together, in perfect unison, the two of us, tumbling through the air, bouncing off the stairs, scrapping along the wall, and finally, landing together in one big heap, wedged up against the hard oak kickboards at the bottom.
Poor sweet Cal on the bottom, with dumb farmer lady on top (who weighs, by the way, considerably more than 120 pounds.) Cal seemed to have landed fairly normally, with all his body parts in the right configuration and orientation. Dumb farmer lady did not.
Cal seemed more confused about having the dumb farmer lady on top of him then anything else. And he definitely didn't understand the screaming.
Lesson number 3: Never go to the barn without your cell phone.
Let me digress for a second to say, that in the few years that I have been doing this animal husbandry thing, novice that I am, I have always been serious about keeping my phone with me. Not because I worry about the 120 pound goats really, but we have ponies as well and, well, with an 800 pound pony, you just never know right? So, I always keep my phone on me when I'm in the barn. Always.
Except Easter Sunday 2016.
As I lay scrunched up, screaming, at the bottom of the stairs, with my upper leg going one way and my lower leg going the other, I realized I did not have my phone.
Perfect. Half past ten at night, in the barn, with a busted knee and a poor silly goat struggling to get out from under me. Little faces peered out in concern all around me, but not a single one belonged to a being with opposable thumbs and a cell phone.
Dang my stupid animal-loving heart.
Lesson number 4: Never wrestle with a goat on stairs during lambing season.
And I still had two bottle babies out in the back barn to feed.
Again, let me digress just to say, "Yippee, it's lambing season." So far, in addition to the three goat kids, we've had 6 little black lambs and our first ever white lamb (double yay - a purebred Lincoln). Unfortunately, babies 5 and 6 were rejected by their mom, so they've been in my bathroom for the past couple of weeks. I wasn't sure they were going to survive at first, but by the weekend they were doing so well that I had taken them out to the barn to live with the other lambs. Except for the constant trips to feed, it's just easier this way.
Feeding them was the last item on my to do list that night. When Cal and I took our trip down the stairs, the bottle babies were still waiting for their dinner.
Once I got my leg straightened out, it was clear I was going nowhere in a hurry. I couldn't stand on the leg at all, never mind walk. I briefly considered staying in the barn until somebody found me, but, realistically, that could have been all night, and like I said, I had those bottle babies to feed. I didn't think they'd survive the night without food.
It's a bit of a blur, but somehow, using a shovel as a crutch, I managed to get back to the house and wake-up the teenager and then somehow with the teenager's help, managed to get out to the back barn, to feed the babies.
I had thought I'd go to the ER, but by the time we were done, it was after midnight and I could tell by then that painful as the knee was, it wasn't broken and I was too exhausted to go through the ordeal of the ER just to have the doctor tell me I had sprained it, so I wrapped it up in ice and went to bed.
Monday afternoon, I did finally get to the doctor and what did he say?
After he got past all the scrapes and cuts on my face, (It's my knee that's a problem, Doc.)
after he got past the black eye and need for a tetanus booster, (Truly, Doc, the knee?)
after he got over the sight of a woman with a polo wrap wound around her knee,
Doc, "What is that?"
Me, "It's a polo wrap."
Doc, "Huh?"
Me, "It's a horse thing. You wrap their legs with it. It's all we had."
Doc, "Oh. Well, you sprained it."
And, there it was.
A sprain.
Without an MRI, I'll never know exactly what damage I did. The doctor said only serious athletes really need to know exactly what kind of damage they have, so an MRI was out. I can't say I really disagree, although it did cross my mind that he probably has no idea how much physical labor farmers do and how shit-out-of-luck I will be if it doesn't heal well.
Still, it's been a couple of days now, and it's already somewhat better.
For one thing, I'm not screaming.
And I don't need a shovel to walk, though hobbling is a truly inefficient way to distribute hay.
One flake here...hobble hobble hobble; one flake here...hobble hobble hobble; one flack here...hobble hobble hobble.
Ahhhh, feeding goes on for hours.
And, there's a distinct wobble in the joint that was never there before.
Seems like a big price to pay for a lesson I should have had for free.
I mean, honestly, who wrestles goats on stairs?
Dumb. Really dumb.
Recently, as the long indoor barn season started to wind down, Cal and Eamon, our two bucks, decided they'd had enough of their stall and took to going over its walls every day.
For lack of a better solution, I took to stalling them in the pen under the stairs to the loft. They didn't really like that and before too long they'd worked out, like Woody, the pen's previous inhabitant, how to get out of the pen, up the stairs and into the loft itself. When Woody first tried this trick, I worried about leaving him up there, but he seemed pretty content and could go up and down at will, so I left him to it. Same thing with Eamon. The most recent addition to the pen, Cal, also figured out pretty quickly how to go up, but unlike Woody and Eamon, was unclear how to come down. I guess the stairs are steep and a little intimidating. Anyway, I noticed over the weekend that Cal was doing a lot of whining at mealtime (not unusual), from up in the loft (a bit unusual), but not actually coming down to eat (very unusual). The notion of a goat unable to traverse stairs seemed unthinkable, so I didn't think about it too much. Until Sunday night when I went out to do the last feeding and checking and tucking in and Cal was still up in the loft and as far as I could tell had not come down all weekend.
Sigh.
I couldn''t leave him there right?
So I went up to get him.
Lesson number 1: Never wrestle a goat.
At this point, let me point out that Cal is a big, spectacular Pygora buck who weighs, at minimium, 120 pounds and sports a very impressive set of pointy horns at least 2 feet across tip to tip. They make pretty good handles, as long as you hold on tight. Cal also has the sweetest personality ever bestowed on a goat of either gender, so I thought nothing of going up to lead him down myself if need be. What are those horns for after all?
Lesson number 2: Never wrestle a goat on stairs.
We shouldn't have to learn this lesson, right? It should come for free.
I climbed the stairs that are wedged tightly into the corner of the first stall. Did I mention they're pretty steep? And there's no rail of any sort. It's a barn after all. At the bottom of the stairs is a tight little turn in front of the hard oak kickboards of the barn wall. At the top of the stairs was Cal, watching me with a worried little look on his beautiful goat face. I climbed high enough to talk to him, face to face, eye to eye, but even with my encouragement, he was adament. No stairs. I took a deep breathe to clear my late night sleepy brain and thought, "Ok, horns it is. Let's get this done."
I grabbed hold and gave a gentle pull.
No go.
I pulled again.
He put a tentative hoof down a step and stopped.
I set my feet firmly. Yes, I clearly remember thinking, "Get a good foothold," and pulled harder.
He put a second hoof down on the steps.
I must have encouraged him to continue with another tug. Such good horns.
He started to scrabble on the boards.
I stopped pulling.
He started falling.
I pulled up now, instead of down.
Yeah, that's right, at this point I'm still thinking "I can control this."
Ha, I can no more control the descent of 120 pounds of flailing goat from ten feet in the air, than I can fly.
Though fly we did, in a manner of speaking. Together, in perfect unison, the two of us, tumbling through the air, bouncing off the stairs, scrapping along the wall, and finally, landing together in one big heap, wedged up against the hard oak kickboards at the bottom.
Poor sweet Cal on the bottom, with dumb farmer lady on top (who weighs, by the way, considerably more than 120 pounds.) Cal seemed to have landed fairly normally, with all his body parts in the right configuration and orientation. Dumb farmer lady did not.
Cal seemed more confused about having the dumb farmer lady on top of him then anything else. And he definitely didn't understand the screaming.
Lesson number 3: Never go to the barn without your cell phone.
Let me digress for a second to say, that in the few years that I have been doing this animal husbandry thing, novice that I am, I have always been serious about keeping my phone with me. Not because I worry about the 120 pound goats really, but we have ponies as well and, well, with an 800 pound pony, you just never know right? So, I always keep my phone on me when I'm in the barn. Always.
Except Easter Sunday 2016.
As I lay scrunched up, screaming, at the bottom of the stairs, with my upper leg going one way and my lower leg going the other, I realized I did not have my phone.
Perfect. Half past ten at night, in the barn, with a busted knee and a poor silly goat struggling to get out from under me. Little faces peered out in concern all around me, but not a single one belonged to a being with opposable thumbs and a cell phone.
Dang my stupid animal-loving heart.
Lesson number 4: Never wrestle with a goat on stairs during lambing season.
And I still had two bottle babies out in the back barn to feed.
Again, let me digress just to say, "Yippee, it's lambing season." So far, in addition to the three goat kids, we've had 6 little black lambs and our first ever white lamb (double yay - a purebred Lincoln). Unfortunately, babies 5 and 6 were rejected by their mom, so they've been in my bathroom for the past couple of weeks. I wasn't sure they were going to survive at first, but by the weekend they were doing so well that I had taken them out to the barn to live with the other lambs. Except for the constant trips to feed, it's just easier this way.
Feeding them was the last item on my to do list that night. When Cal and I took our trip down the stairs, the bottle babies were still waiting for their dinner.
Once I got my leg straightened out, it was clear I was going nowhere in a hurry. I couldn't stand on the leg at all, never mind walk. I briefly considered staying in the barn until somebody found me, but, realistically, that could have been all night, and like I said, I had those bottle babies to feed. I didn't think they'd survive the night without food.
It's a bit of a blur, but somehow, using a shovel as a crutch, I managed to get back to the house and wake-up the teenager and then somehow with the teenager's help, managed to get out to the back barn, to feed the babies.
I had thought I'd go to the ER, but by the time we were done, it was after midnight and I could tell by then that painful as the knee was, it wasn't broken and I was too exhausted to go through the ordeal of the ER just to have the doctor tell me I had sprained it, so I wrapped it up in ice and went to bed.
Monday afternoon, I did finally get to the doctor and what did he say?
After he got past all the scrapes and cuts on my face, (It's my knee that's a problem, Doc.)
after he got past the black eye and need for a tetanus booster, (Truly, Doc, the knee?)
after he got over the sight of a woman with a polo wrap wound around her knee,
Doc, "What is that?"
Me, "It's a polo wrap."
Doc, "Huh?"
Me, "It's a horse thing. You wrap their legs with it. It's all we had."
Doc, "Oh. Well, you sprained it."
And, there it was.
A sprain.
Without an MRI, I'll never know exactly what damage I did. The doctor said only serious athletes really need to know exactly what kind of damage they have, so an MRI was out. I can't say I really disagree, although it did cross my mind that he probably has no idea how much physical labor farmers do and how shit-out-of-luck I will be if it doesn't heal well.
Still, it's been a couple of days now, and it's already somewhat better.
For one thing, I'm not screaming.
And I don't need a shovel to walk, though hobbling is a truly inefficient way to distribute hay.
One flake here...hobble hobble hobble; one flake here...hobble hobble hobble; one flack here...hobble hobble hobble.
Ahhhh, feeding goes on for hours.
And, there's a distinct wobble in the joint that was never there before.
Seems like a big price to pay for a lesson I should have had for free.
I mean, honestly, who wrestles goats on stairs?
Dumb. Really dumb.
Sunday, January 24, 2016
Tuesday, January 19, 2016
A cold day in January
 |
| Solar power, such as it is |
 |
| Barn wall as solar collector - thawing pony buckets frozen solid overnight |
 |
| Licorice coveting goats' second cutting hay. Amelia: I know you're there pony. Go away. Can't you see I'm eating for three here. |
 |
| Breakfast |
 |
| Noona: Is that food? |
 |
| Food groups |
 |
| Brianna and Bumblebee tucked in among the big guys |
 |
| Bookends Clementine and Wembley |
 |
| My Clementine |
 |
| Too busy to chat |
 |
| Tiny Tim with the big girls, Caterpillar and Bo Sheep |
 |
| Loretta. A meal of her own |
Sunday, January 17, 2016
Fox Scream
So, about that coyote footprint.
The dogs were acting weird this morning during their pre-dawn backyard break. Weird enough that I went outside to see what the deal was. They were lined up at the fence facing the paddocks behind the pony barn, staring into the dark. And from the dark came the creepiest sound I've ever heard. Silence, punctuated by a scream, every 10 or 15 seconds.
Made my heart stop.
There were no other sounds, which just contributed to the freakishness. No skirmishing, no tramping through the leaves or branches, no sheep baaing, or ponies stomping. Just this bizarre scream.
Pictures of coyotes marauding through the alpaca pen came unbidden to mind. Alpacas can make some pretty odd sounds, so I had to cram on my boots and run out to check on the poor guys.
Of course, the pacas were fine, if a little spooked to see me in the predawn dark, so I went back to the house and forgot about it.
Later I happened to mention it to my friend across the street.
She immediately asked, "Did it sound like a girl screaming?"
"Why yes. Yes it did. It sounded JUST like a girl screaming. Did you hear it?"
Turns out she heard it coming from behind her barn a couple of days ago.
It wasn't a coyote.
It was a red fox!
I feel so much better. Of course the tracks up the drive and by the house MUST have been a fox. Not a coyote.
I'm pretty sure a fox is not going to kill my sheep or alpacas.
But now I really want a night cam.
Friday, January 15, 2016
Eeek
Bigger than a cat's paw. Smaller than a big dog like our Boomerang.
Notice the claw prints at the top.
I'm 99% certain it's a coyote print.
I hear a pack yipping out by the creek in the fields behind our pastures almost every night, but I've never seen them come so close to the house or barns before.
We have so many little bitty sheep. It's a worry.
Thursday, December 10, 2015
Sunday, November 8, 2015
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