pheasant

Predators 12/ Farm 8

Steve HardinLeave a comment

It was a sad day in Chickenville, many residents perished when the great big doglike predator decided to visit yesterday. Annmarie went outside with the grandbaby ready to depart the farm and spotted a coyote right next to the barn with a chicken in its mouth! She grabbed the wrong rifle and had a hard time getting a focus through the scope, they are all set for me. In the end she did not get a shot off. We have since decided that she can just grab the 30-30, it has open sights and from the house she can hit anything she can see with it.

She ended up walking the road up along all of our bottom pasture looking for the offender and spotted it ducking into the creek bed down near field #4. Again no shooting commenced, she does not believe that random fire in the last known location is an effective dissuasion. We differ on this belief but I was not the one out walking the field, I was in town shopping.

On a plus note the spring up in field #2 is putting water out again. It had dried up late summer.

When she came back and searched all around the barn all she could find was one lone hen and multiple different feather piles. There were no other hens near the barn. Annmarie was sure that the coyote had killed a rooster which is good as I have an extra. I could not count the chickens until after dark. They all need to go into the coop and settle down for me to get an accurate count. We do in fact still have three roosters, (they are hard to kill and are usually the last to succumb to the predators) and now only have 17 hens! This means we have lost 10 hens to the predators in recent days. I was pretty sure the count should be 25-27 hens. I had to look back three months on the chicken spreadsheet to find the last hen count.

Once again the predators are winning. It is a rare year that the farm comes out on top. We almost did it this year. When I was getting rocks last week I noticed a coyote dig under the fence into the wheat field. I am going to have to set out a trap again in very specific locations where they are crawling under the fence.

We had a bird hunter come out today and we asked that he watch for coyotes. He ended up shooting one coyote but no pheasants! Good for us, bad for him.

Haying completed, for now

Steve HardinLeave a comment

Mr Rainman says I plan vacations around haying season. I took a week off and went and visited old buddies from the military for a week. He ended up having to finish rowing and baling field one. That would not have been too bad but the field is very rough. We need to rig some kind of ground roller up so we can run it over the ground in the spring! We really need to get some of the ridges and bumps out of the field. Having the elk in there every winter is not helping it at all either. They are leaving holes from digging in the snow. On those little tractors it is very bouncy.

Honestly, the best part of my vacation was not having to finish picking up bales from the field! Mr Rainman brought in all of the bales and stacked them into the barn. He is a rockstar. I think if the two of us finish raising the height of the bales in the barn we will be able to get all of the second cutting into the barn.

We still have to move the old hay from two years ago from the old lamb shed into the barn on the overhead walkway. We will use it for bedding for the winter. I used to sell it but I realized eventually that I could just use it for bedding. The new hay is so much nicer that the sheep really just ignore the old stuff and spread it around looking for a couple of wonderful morsels. This way I do not have to buy any straw.

It looks like we may get a second cutting on about 1/3 of field #1 and #2. So I figure around 2-3 tons and I will cut the Naked Gardener’s field for a second time also. He is about two miles away from our house so I just drive over with my small equipment as needed until I get it all done.

He ended up finding a pheasant’s nest and she would not give it up, so he placed two torn up bales on either side of the nest. The hen seemed to think that was plenty of cover and came right back to sit on the nest.

We have decided to spray some more Rejuvra this fall. We are going to go down by the schoolhouse and see if we can get the good grass to spread out. We are also going to spray a section of field #2 and #1. Field #3 and #4 are a waste currently. They are 100% cheat grass. I really need to burn the fields but the fire’s have already started up around us. I am going to plow them. It’s another way to kill the cheat grass seed. It cannot emerge when it is buried under a lot of soil. I am just not sure what will work better.