We sleep at night with the windows open.  That cool breeze is always refreshing.  The side effect is my wife, Annmarie can hear everything that is going on outside the house.  Which by transference means I am alerted (shaking or hollering) of the goings on outside.  This morning before 0500 I was woken up (hollering) to my wife announcing that we had more baby sheep.  Twins again!!  This is good news and I even managed to roll out of bed with very little prompting.  She said she could hear them and they woke her up.  You could hear them bawling occasionally from our bedroom window.  So we got dressed and trudged out to the barn lot.  I remembered to bring the camera with us and a towel (only one towel, I did mention there were twins?).  The babies were literally only minutes old. They were still covered in goo, shaky and momma had not birthed the afterbirth (placenta) yet.  So we decided to lock momma and babies up in the loading corral for a few days.  So I went and filled a five gallon bucket of water and got some grain for the momma sheep.  We took the babies to the corral and she followed .  We tried to hold her and let the babies latch on, but she kept shifting even when I had her pinned to the fence and eating grain.  So we just left them.  Annmarie will check on them in three hours when they get back from swim.  She can feed a supplemental bottle then if needed.  Now the cool thing is both of them are girls!!  Way cool.  Two more sheep for free to breed.  I like that.  I have a picture of the babies, but you will notice the flash had to be used as it was still dark outside.  They will be far cuter by this afternoon.  Momma will have them all cleaned up and it is supposed to be nice and warm today, low 80’s so they will dry out nicely.

Well here it is nighttime again.  We got home after dark so I had to take a flashlight out to the chicken coop so I could collect eggs.  I still don’t have power to the coop yet.  It is a low priority.  Besides, the outside extension cord has grown down into the yard and you cannot even see the yellow cord any more.  I gotta get that fence done before anything else.  When I went to get eggs (in the dark) the predator trap was sprung again.  I shined the light in and something black was in the cage.  Upon closer inspection it was another chicken.  They just are not very smart.  I tried to shake it out of the trap but it would not fall out, I finally had to reach in and pull it out.  I did do a recount on my poultry parade and I still have 23 hens and 1 rooster.  So no one has died since I implemented the lockdown after lights out policy.  I only collected 17 eggs.  I am missing those 6 laying hens.

I worked on fencing once Sarah and I came back from gate shopping with Grandma.  I have a very nice sunburn on my neck to prove it.  Cooper (nephew) and I got the ram pasture gate installed, 50% of the upper fence totally completed and put in the end posts and supports on the other side of the gate.  Just need to put the angle support wire in place and string the sheep wire on that 50% and we will be done!!  One more day, this upcoming Wednesday, and I can turn the sheep loose in the ram pasture.  Just made it, as they are running out of fodder in the barn lot.  No way I could go another week with them in there.  Oh boy, once that is done I get to start back on the orchard fence.  I will be glad when the fencing is done and I can go to the barn.  That is my real project for the year.  I want to get that up and running for the sheep this winter.

Plus, I need to start picking out my pieces of wood I am going to use for the trim inside our house from the barn wood.  I am going to trim out all our windows and the kicker board along the floor out of barn wood.

I went out this morning to let the chickens out of Alcatraz and I only counted 22 hens… now it is easy to miscount as they came pouring out the door like crazed beasts running for the cat food on the cellar wall.  I am sure they heard me call the cats just before letting them out.  They think “here kitty, kitty” means “here chicky, chicky” (yes, we really do use both as they work for the cats and chickens).  So I could just be off by one in the counting.  Will have to verify tonight when I lock them up.  They are far easier to count when they are sitting on their roosts.  I found the trap not sprung and the chicken wing taken out of the trap and the cat food missing.  So I will refill it and try again.  I am really hoping it is not a mink.  It will be very hard to catch if it is.  With it being super wet and both creeks running it very well could be.  I need that kill zone!  Unfortunately, I need that ram pasture fence done first!!  So I am running into town to pick up our daughter from swim team practice, going to pick out a new gate for the orchard pasture and then back at that fence.  Gotta work tomorrow so I can rest then.

It seems like I talk a lot about fencing.  I do actually, that is because I am constantly fencing!!  Fixing old fencing is a skate in the park compared to building it from scratch.  I removed the bottom three strands from the ram pasture (had smooth wire and sheep just used the entire fence as a gate), I drug them around to the front orchard fence and installed them above the sheep wire I put in last week.  I was tightening the wire with a come-a-long (i wanted it really tight) and I pulled over my end post on the far end.  I had buttressed it incorrectly and allowed the railroad tie to move about 3 inches at the top.  Now, I have to cut the bottom sheep wire loose, apply a new tightening wire going the opposite direction and stretch the bottom sheep wire again to get the little wobble out.  I have been installing used gates in all my new fence sections.  I keep scrounging all over the farm and finding ancient sheep gates.  They look like the bottoms of spring mattresses only longer.  So, my mother-in-law saw the one I was going to install up front between our houses.  So tomorrow we are going to go shopping for a new vehicle gate and people gate to install on that visible section of the fence.  It lets me use that gate for another section of the farm.  As soon as I can get this fencing done, I am moving to the barn.  The sheep need a place to hang out in the winter.  We had an amateur photographer come spend a day and night taking pictures of the farm and buildings over the weekend.  Once we get a copy of the pictures we will post a few to show everyone.

Well, I checked the live trap this morning to see if my chicken killer was caught.  I had a kitten and her mother in the trap.  I shook them up a little and dumped them on the ground, so hopefully they won’t be back.  I opened both doors (exterior door to run, the killer would have to climb over the electric fence, then open the chicken door to coop that was latched shut) so my chickens could free range .  I had 29 chickens before the foul play and only have 23 now.  A 21% loss.  No more 24 eggs/day…  Sarah collected 18 eggs today.  Tonight when I was locking the chickens up I spotted something in the trap.  I ran over to confront my killer and it was a chicken.  Stupid hen had gotten stuck in the pen trying to steal cat food.  Chickens love cat food.  So I let her out and shooed her into the coop for lockdown and baited the trap again.  Hopefully, I will catch my villain soon.  I didn’t have time to weed eat a kill zone around the coop today.  I need to get the ram pasture fence completed so the sheep will have a new grazing area.  So back at it again tomorrow!  I found some new muscles in my back I didn’t know existed, just below my shoulder blades.  Nothing like digging those fence posts by hand.

We keep trying to get a picture of the baby lambs playing king of the hill.  Our ram lays down on the ground and the babies stand on top of him and then push each other off of him to be king of the hill.  I looked out the living room window and they were both standing on top of him.  Our first lamb used to do this also.  We are amazed at how tolerant he is of the lambs.  We will keep trying to get a picture of this in action.

It figures.  I finally get the chickens laying and am able to sell all the eggs we are collecting from our true free range flock and the big bad chicken predator comes in to destroy my plan.  While I was off at work the nasty predator came in and started killing my chickens (graphic picture to follow).  Now mind you I have been just letting the chickens do their chicken thing.  I never lock them up at night, they come and go as they please and whenever they get tired of free ranging for feed they can come back to the coop and get the free – all you can eat buffet.  A good life for a chicken if you can get it.  My only problem with this scenario is predators.  Now that I have the cat issue fixed, I still have to deal with the wild animal problem.  I have the electric fence running around the top of the coop run, but that only works when I shut the door. So tonight, I shut the run door, and I even shut the coop chicken access door and used the latch on the door in case my perimeter electrified fence was breached!  I also set up the live trap.  I used a dead chicken wing as a plate and poured cat food on top of it.  So as I am sitting here typing my post, both Annmarie and I start smelling skunk.  So I grabbed my boots, Walther p22 pistol with laser sight and a large bright flashlight to scope out the coop action.  I walked all over and all I found were 3 cats.  One of them got lucky, he was hiding behind a rock crib and I had to put the sneak on.   It was just a cat, Indy our inside cat.  I have learned to not shoot first at night, gotta have a positive ID before I pull the trigger.  On top of it all, I am going to have to borrow my father’s weed eater tomorrow (I killed two today at my wife’s grandmother’s house.  different story) to clear a kill lane around my chicken yard so I will have a clean shot at whatever is killing the chickens.  And I really need to get the ram pasture fence completed because the sheep are running out of forage in the barn lot.  It just never ends.
Here is my poor defenseless dead chicken.  I did not include the two different piles of feathers I found.  insert warning here courtesy of the spouse, not for the weak of stomach.