predators

Predators 2/Farm 5

Steve Hardin1 Comment

Well it has been a long two weeks and we are starting to make some progress on the predators. I continue to take time 2-4 times a week to drive around the entire property looking for coyotes. I had to take Snoop up to the boneyard. He up and died on us last week. He spent the last couple of days just lounging around. It was hot so he decided to just sit under the sprinkler to stay cool. He was by far the alpaca with the most personality. We are not really sad, he lived two years longer than we thought he would and he was ancient.

I was driving Snoop up to his eternal resting spot, the boneyard, when I spotted a couple of coyotes. I stopped, kept the tractor RPMs up high and proceeded to dispatch two coyotes with two shots. The not being able to hit them at a dead run thing is rough on your confidence level. I only have 12 rounds of 243 left out of the ones my father loaded by hand almost 20 years ago. I will need to get some more loaded as I am going to run out of them before the summer is out. I was out spraying the CRP for star thistle and spotted a coyote on my way back to the house to get another load of spray. The coyote never slowed down and once it ran for the fence it just kept running. I was going to give it time to settle down and stop but it did not do that. So I just started throwing lead at it, I managed to get off four shots before it got out of range.

It is painful to just hold onto a rifle for hours on end while bouncing around on a tractor. I need some form of rifle holder on the tractor. I am going to put it on the Kubota. We mow and spray with that tractor so it has more time on it throughout the year. I am going to weld a holder onto the lift arms, an upside down U and then bolt a set of rifle holders with bungee straps to hold the rifle in place. I just need to make the U tall enough that when I lower the bucket the U doesn’t hit the hood on the tractor. I have a bent support that I replaced I am thinking about just cutting it in half to use as the uprights. It is already painted bright orange so I would just need to grind the paint off near the weld. I am becoming a lot more comfortable with the wire feed welder. I had to slow down the feed speed from 200 to 175 so that I could make a molten pool and push it along. Once the rifle holder is in place I will then need to work on a new varmint rifle. I need one with a synthetic stock so it can take the bouncing around and beating it is going to be subjected to every time we hop on the tractor. I am thinking about the sights as it will take a beating.

Milo, the wonder dog, helped me cap a couple of raccoons in the last week, so the farm is currently ahead of the predators this year. Our cows are calving but so far we only have three calves out of six cows. We don’t think one of them is pregnant. The cows do not seem to have any issues with the coyotes. I think the momma cows are just too mean and protective when a dog shaped animal is near the calves.

Border Terrier logic

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We have a 16 month old border terrier. Annmarie has been working with him and takes him to the hospital to become a therapy dog. He loves everyone and will let anyone pet him. He does not get ruffled, riding elevator, around walkers, canes, wheelchairs, noisy IV pumps, emotional families, emotional patients. He is pretty much a loving rock.

At home he has decided that the yard is his space. We have barn cats that sneak down to eat the porch kitty food and he tends to harass them at bedtime because they are not supposed to be there. Last week we let the dogs outside at bedtime and told them it was bedtime potties. Milo ran around the yard and next thing we know he is barking up a storm. I knocked on the side window to get him to quit barking, it did nothing. I went and opened the small window in the laundry room and hollered at him, no response or let up on the noise. Then he starts doing this weird baying sound and is fighting with something outside the back door.

I grab the spotlight and my pistol and just step out the back door looking for the cat. Milo has a full size raccoon trapped on the cat food ledge and every time it tries to get off the ledge on the front side, Milo drives it back. I call him off and he comes right to me. The raccoon is promptly dispatched. I have friends who say I should live trap and move them. The problem is that everyone else in town live traps them and turns them loose at the edge of our property so there is an endless supply of raccoons (i.e “chicken killers”). I figured out that since we have moved back home I have had over 300 chickens killed by raccoons. A chicken won’t even lay an egg until it’s over 6 months old. That is a time and money commitment. I don’t have any sympathy for the raccoons anymore.

This week our heat pump went out on Sunday night so we ended up sleeping downstairs. It was 2 degrees cooler downstairs than upstairs. Annmarie let Milo outside around Midnight because he woke her up. Normally he sleeps through the entire night upstairs with us. Around 0130 he starts raising a ruckus. I wake up to Annmarie hollering my name and hollering at our big dog to get inside. The border collie keeps trying to run upstairs because she knows if I am running outside in the middle of the night I am armed. I grabbed the spotlight and my pistol and run out onto the front porch. Milo is hollering, growling and some other creature is hollering. I get to the front porch and I can tell that they are down in the water in the ditch under the crossing board. I think Milo has another raccoon pinned into the corner and he is just waiting for me to show up. I get across the hillside and Milo has another raccoon by the throat in the water and mud and is not letting go. I call him off and he just lets go and moves six feet away. The raccoon is dispatched but when I went to take Milo inside the house he is absolutely filthy. In his need to dominate he failed to take into account his surroundings, he was covered in mud and water. He had to sleep on the back porch and then get a shower the next day before he could go back to work.

We are pretty sure no one at work believes us. He is the calmest gentlest dog when he is there. Now every night when we let him out for his bedtime routine he runs the entire length of the fence patrolling to make sure that no raccoon has encroached.

Predators 2/ Farm 1

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Well the coyotes are back, we have lost two lambs over the course of the last three weeks. For a while we could not spot them but now they are frequently visible and unfortunately very far away. Four of us have shot at them, some of us repeatedly and so far all we are doing is scaring them to run off. I realize that harassment is a valid tool for getting them to leave the sheep alone it is just not very final. If you don’t keep up the pressure than the predators just come back and start eating more animals.

I have been working on getting the tall fields with cheat grass in them mowed down so there are fewer places to hide for the coyotes. I am making pretty good progress but fields #3 & 4, still need a lot of mowing done. I carried a rifle for two straight days while I was mowing and only spotted one coyote. I missed repeatedly. I could use some practice but at the rate I am shooting at the coyotes I will be getting things dialed in soon.

We have not lost a lamb in the last two weeks. I go on patrol around the entire outside of the farm then drive two sides of the CRP looking for coyotes every couple of days. There is a path on the edge of the CRP now that I mowed in a couple of weeks ago. We need to get the weeds under control in the CRP and the edges are where the weeds are creeping in. I mowed a couple of weeks ago and will spray it this week. We are going for a good kill on the star thistle. The stuff is very nasty.

Once I have the edges of the CRP sprayed then I will work on the hillside and the backside of the field #1. I mowed there on Friday and knocked it back down. This also gives us great visibility for when the coyotes are moving through the fields. Normally coyotes will crawl under a fence but Annmarie spotted one this morning that just leaped over the fence! That is cheating! She was making our bed and spotted it just ambling by on the back hillside.

The Gingerman heard her and leaped out of bed and ran outside with a rifle. It was gone. I am pretty sure that it was the one I shot at up in field #2. I got dressed and went out looking in the pickup right after that to no avail.

Predators 1/ Farm 1

Steve Hardin1 Comment

Well it is that time of year again when the predators decide to come out and play. We had a lamb killed up in field four by the old hand dug well. The lambs are 2-3 months old at this point but still easy pickings for a coyote. We had someone come out with thermals but they only killed one coyote. I have yet to see a coyote in the last three months. Mr Rainman spotted one in field four but did not have a rifle. He sat out watching the area after he grabbed one but the coyote never reappeared.

The cheat grass is horrible this year so we are going to have to push all of the animals down by the schoolhouse. The grass is much better down there. We have had one cow give birth and it is a cute little black calf. Everyone was so tame that Mr Rainman carried the calf across the water and no one cared. After about day four he could not catch the calf, it was too fast! We have five black cows and one brown one. The brown one was the calmest of the bunch we sold off. Now that we only have calm cows we need to get rid of the brown one, it’s too crazy. It is amazing how much your tolerance drops once you have gotten rid of the crazy ones. Placid is perfect.

Needless to say with the coyotes making a reemergence we have started to carry a rifle around. Frank doesn’t seem to mind, he just wants to be fed his bottle. Unfortunately, we are weaning him so he only gets a bottle in the evening now. He is really not onboard with this plan. The lambs head butt the ewes udder to promote milk release. In other words when Frank is standing directly in front of you, pay attention or he will head butt you some place you don’t want and it will not feel good. He did still get his bottle so from his perspective it worked.

We pulled the bull off of the cows before we let them down by the schoolhouse. We still have seven teenagers running around down there and one of them is an unbred heifer. He does not like being separated and has been beating on the gates so we had to make a repair. I remembered why the gate had not been repaired before this, the gates were put on with the last of the hardware I had on hand. I used three different kinds of bolts/screws and they all have a different driver! It took us a half an hour to find all of the right tools and one of the anchor bolts had a custom pattern. We beat it out with a hammer and wrench. Hopefully, the old large bolts we installed will hold up better than the fancy new ones.

Farm 4, Predators 0

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This is a great start to 2025! So far this year the Gingerman has killed one raccoon from the in-law’s front porch, it was eating her cat food. I have managed to kill two out in the barn and just caught one in the live trap. I thought we had all of the raccoons out of the barn but yesterday when I was chasing the cows out of the barn I noticed a single set of raccoon paw prints leading up the hill from the spring to the underside of the barn. There is one more still living in the barn. They eat the cat food and make an incredible mess. They find a high spot and use it as the bathroom making huge piles of feces. Which I then later discover and often they are in a difficult spot to reach or require a lot of moving stuff out of the way. I have a pile on top of my drying wood in the barn and I believe there is another pile on top of old wood we stacked up in the barn over a pass through in one of the hay bays.

I really need to pull that wood out of the hay bay and look at it. I bet about 90% can be burnt and the rest moved into the granary for later use. I was more of a hoarder early on when it came to barn wood. I realize now that it is only usually good for picture frames. Especially, wood that has been out in the weather for over 120 years.

Yesterday, the Gingerman is leaving the house and spots a coyote out in the wheat stubble field. He calls the progeny and she tells me. It is running towards the old chicken coop and the bottoms so I just need to get out there with a gun. I had not replaced the ammunition on the stock holder and when I grabbed the gun I realized that all the bullets were just empty brass. I only had two bullets. I wanted to go upstairs to get more ammo but after cleaning off the scope (dusty from construction work) the women said I was taking too long. So I went outside with only two shots.

I hoofed it up to the far end of the barn lot (100 yards) and waited. I tried calling the Gingerman on his cell phone but he was in a dead spot and so was I. I kept scanning for movement, no coyote, but there were about seven rooster pheasants flying around at the beginning of field #3 and walking around the bottoms on the snow. I stood out there for 15 minutes and never saw the coyote. It ended up turning for the creek bed around the cliff corner above me and I would never have been able to see it unless I walked another 200 yards in the deep snow.

I will be adding bullets to the stock ammo holder as I usually need more than two shots. Annmarie and I have been talking about how to store weapons at the ready inside the house but have them better secured. We will be doing some more research. Leaving them all stacked by the door is probably not a great long term plan. It definitely is not keeping them clean and free of dust and dirt.