racoons

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.

Bathroom day 9

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It has been a long two days. I just keep finding more issues. We ordered a special shower nozzle. I thought it was the valve and nozzle, it turns out it was not. I was able to get a Delta valve in Pendleton that will work just fine. We worked on getting the pocket door opened up but we did not have a long enough self tapping screw so that involved another trip to town. Regular screws were not going to go into the metal support studs for the pocket door.

We did manage to get the pocket door opening cut out. Mr Rainman suggested we go to Hermiston to buy all of the Schluter supplies so we have them on hand and can potentially avoid the upcoming snowstorm. We did not manage to avoid the snowstorm but the road did not get closed on us. I did however get pulled over by the police and issued a warning for driving too fast in bad weather conditions. This was fair but I am unsure why we got picked out of moving traffic. The officer was right, we went a lot slower the rest of the day.

The remodel store was amazing and they had 90% of what we needed. There is a lot of stuff to putting the room together according to how Schluter wants it so that the waterproof guarantee is met. You have to take pictures and document the process and follow their installation instructions. So their website and YouTube videos will be a necessary component of getting this all put together correctly. I have to say that we are only going to do this once and we do not want it to ever damage our house. Water is incredibly insidious and can damage a lot of your house before you catch it. We had to tear out an entire master bath and subfloor in our second home due to a crack in our tile wall in the shower. We don’t want to do this job again in our lifetimes.

The entire Schluter waterproofing material to do the entire bathroom was around $3500. The grout alone was $800, it is 100% epoxy based and nasty stuff to work with but it is the same stuff you would use in a pool so water is really not an issue. Now if you have been to the hardware store you know that a 5# box of screws is now $40. We have already used about $150 in screws alone in a 6’x8’x8’ room. We have over $1500 in lumber for that little room. It is not cheap to remodel currently, and honestly, I do not see the prices dropping. By the time we are done we will have spent $15k in materials. This will have gotten us exactly what we wanted a waterproof room that has an entire tiled floor, tiled shower floor to ceiling, a pocket door, custom vanity (I altered) with granite top, custom oak linen cabinet made to fit the space (I build), smooth profile toilet, in wall cubbies in shower and medicine cabinet, in ceiling heater, Bluetooth speaker vent fan, tile 4’ up all other interior walls, tongue and groove wood above the tiles and a tin tile stamped patterned metal ceiling with tin crown molding. Doing the work yourself is the key to keeping the cost down. It will take at least four weeks to get it done, maybe a little longer for the finishing touches. I am told that this is a 100% completion project and there will be no stopping until it is done. I may have to order some new wood trim for the hallway walls but that will wait until we are at that step so we can order the necessary material only. But yes this is the last BIG ticket item for our house to be completely remodeled. It will have only taken us 20 years to rehab and repair our lovely home.

We have enough material to start getting stuff done. We will install the plywood over entire room then start installing the Kerdi-Board on the walls, then put the membrane on the floor. We are going to tile the main part of the bath first both the floor and walls while we wait for the shower pan insert. There is plenty of work for us to do while we are waiting for the material!

I was unable to pick the grout color so I brought home paper samples and set them on the tiles. We looked at them for a while then made a choice. We are going to go with the “Smoke Grey”, the top one on the picture for all of the grout in the entire room. Now I just have to call in my choice so the coloring can be ordered. We have to mix it into the epoxy when we combine the A & B bottles.

We spotted this weird slide track on our back hillside near the chicken coop. We think it is a raccoon sliding down the hill in the snow. We have seen raccoon tracks in the snow so I know there is at least one living in the barn still. So far I have not lost any chickens to it this year.

Headed into 2025 with a shuffle

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The last of 2024 was painful. Our progeny brought home Covid for the holidays when the entire county is drowning in Influenza. I think I would have rather had the flu. We did manage to get Christmas dinner on the table with a lot of help and we did get to eat said dinner. Otherwise, we slept a lot and took a lot of over the counter medications for symptom control. The Gingerman was the healthiest of us all so he kept the animals fed and even managed to get both large burn piles lit over the course of a week, despite the downpour of intermittent rain we continue to receive.

I have been able to do a few small things around the house. I was able to get the entire driveway torn up and leveled this weekend. An inch of rain really helps soften up the road so I can tear up the top few inches and then drag it smooth. Ideally, it would dry out for a week or so and let the newly moved dirt settle but it just keeps raining. We have already gotten 1.2” of rain in 2025 and it is not even the first week of the year. Our snowpack is at record highs, over 150% so I sure hope that it does not warm up fast this spring or things will be messy. The back creek bed is over twice as wide as it used to be due to the last two floods we had. I am hoping this is enough to keep it contained. We have implemented a couple of other flood control and diversion ditches but none have been tried yet and honestly, I would like to just think that they will work as designed and not have them utilized. Sometimes, it is the thought that counts!

Our sheep are doing great! That fattening up they had in Nov & Dec is holding them over well. We are feeding 6-7 bales every night and they are maintaining weight. I have been feeding for over a month and this last Friday I spotted two raccoons in the barn. They were in the front hay room hiding in the walnut boards that are air drying. There is no way out so they had to stay there the entire time I was feeding. I of course did not have a gun as I have not been taking one out when I feed. It did occur to me to go back to the house and get one but every time I was away from the room for 30 seconds they kept trying to sneak out and I knew they would be gone by the time I got back. It never occurred to me to just call the wife and have her walk the pistol out to me, it was muddy, dark, raining and miserable outside. So now I carry my predator pistol and two clips out to the barn at night for feeding and of course have not seen a single raccoon. I thought we only had one out in the barn, they avoid all traps so shooting them seems to be the only way to get rid of them.

We are taking the last of the animals to slaughter this week. We are taking in eleven lambs for meat for new homes. I have one customer who is opting to do their own cut and wrap. This will be the last of the animals for sale until the lambs from this summer are ready around July 2025.

We have been ordering stuff and getting it ready for the bathroom remodel. We have decided to put in an overhead electric heater, so I am going to have to wire in a 220V service with a timer switch. A 220V timer switch is fairly industrial. So now the wife wants me to hide it in the custom built cabinet. She also wants me to wire in an outlet into the cabinet so that I can hide all of the electronics on one shelf in the cabinet. Both of these things are possible since I am building everything from scratch but it does tend to complicate things. This does not seem to be a consideration when detailing changes. It doesn’t help that I agree with her, having all of the electronics hidden will make for a cleaner, more organized bathroom with more countertop space. I need a 220V breaker, a tile drill bit and a new tile saw blade. I always start a new tile job with a new blade. I am sure I will need more stuff as I know the house is plumbed with Pex but I won’t know if its Pex A or B until I tear into the wall and can look at the connectors. I think it’s Pex B but not positive until I inspect the connectors. There is always something to throws things off. I am going to block off the hallway and set up the tile saw in the hallway after setting up plastic walls outside the bathroom. I will have to bring all of the tile inside and let it warm up to room temperatures before it can be installed. I already told Annmarie that our house is just going to be a construction zone for one month and there is nothing I can do about it.

Farm 7, Predators 3

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It’s that time of year again where the predators start to enjoy fresh chicken and lamb. We have not had much rain in the last three weeks, about 1/10” last week. This has not been enough to keep anything green around us. The raccoons start to think that chicken is a great meal and the coyotes start to like the idea of lamb. Mr Rainman has been going out in the mornings when he arrives and trying to shoot the two coyotes in the upper fields. So far he has missed on three separate occasions. I have been up there seven times and have yet to see a coyote. He thinks he may be scaring them away, we are humoring him at the moment.

The dogs have been barking early in the morning before we go to work. I was able to spot three raccoons running in front of the driveway headed to the barn. By the time I grabbed a pistol and got through two gates to the barn I was able to get one shot off as the coon climbed into the barn and on top of the hay stack. We know they are in the barn as there are two huge piles of raccoon dung in there, like 20-30#/each. They can make a heck of a mess. This is the third time we have seen them but only the first time I have managed to get a shot off. My mother-in-law states they have started coming to her house again to eat the cat food. They pick on the cats and can kill them. Not to mention can add about 50-75# of animals to feed depending on their size.

Friday evening she called me to say that there were several raccoons on her front porch. Normally, I just grab a pistol and walk down there but the raccoons always start to run before I can get close. So I decided to drive the pickup down this time. I grabbed the suppressed 22 pistol and three extra clips. Unless you manage to hit a raccoon directly in the head it takes about an entire clip to put one down, especially if it is very large. We try very hard to not just wound them so lead poisoning by quantity is my strategy.

Luckily, I also have a green laser on the pistol. This helps dramatically when shooting around buildings and other animals. If I would spend some time practicing with the pistol every month I would probably not need the laser. Unfortunately, I don’t have time for that. I could be building more fence or completing another project. So I use a crutch to help me. Plus, in the middle of the night the laser is essential when running around in the dark.

I ended up killing four raccoons. I took 40 rounds of ammo and used 36 rounds by the time I was done. If there had been six raccoons I would have run out of ammo! So I will need to buy another couple of clips. I just fill my front and back pockets with spare clips before I head out of the house. I do keep the empty ones and put them back in a pocket instead of dropping them on the ground. I would lose them nonstop if I dropped them on the ground.

No cats were harmed despite them running all around while I was trying to kill the raccoons.

We put the live trap in the barn but as usual no raccoon is foolish enough to go into it. It has been up for a week with zero results.