vituperation

I did not know raccoons would go for live critters. I always pictured them eating shell fish from streams and lakes but never thought of fur or feathers in their diet. So what is the defense against these furred raiders?

and

I know it would be an enormous amount of work, but would an electrified outer chicken yard perimeter fence work?

Right now, two Havaheart (sp?) traps and many guns.

However…the only reason the chicks were vulnerable is because they weren’t in Coop Knox. That’s been remedied by a cat carrier with some welded wire across the front. One at a time each evening around 6:00, I catch a mother hen and put her in the carrier. Then I back off for a while, and the chicks invariably go into the carrier through that wire fence on the front. Then I close them up, take them into the coop, and let them all out. Problem solved, for now.

Weren’t you diagnosed with Morton’s Neuroma a few years ago?

I was not.

Um,hate me for asking,but didn’t you BURY the fence at least eight inches at a forty-five degree angle facing out,so when the critter starts digging he thinks there’s no use trying anymore?

No.

The chickens are all in disarray today. Friday evening, I moved the teenagers (ie, the ones from the hatchery in March) from the small coop to a fenced section in the big coop, and moved the toddlers (the ones we hatched) from the brooder in the garage to the small coop. I left both groups locked up yesterday, to imprint, while I fenced off a section of the chicken yard so the small chickens will be left alone until they’re a little bigger.

I let everyone out this morning, and they’re all a little freaked.

The toddlers are all hanging out by the workshop, as far as they can get from the other chickens.
I’m sure they’re overwhelmed right now.

The meat chicken yard, for now, anyway. Once everyone’s comfy with one another,
I’ll probably start opening the gate and letting them all mingle.

Mama #1 and her two remaining babies.

Mama #2 and her five babies.

The teenagers like to hang out in the shrubbery around one of the pecan trees.

Sorry for those crappy pictures, Robyn has the good camera upstairs with the kittens.

McLovin is being an ass, running around everywhere and making all kinds of noise. Witness:

“Can I help you, sir?” the young man behind the counter asked.

I set the yellow and white box down.

“Do these things really work?” I asked.

“I don’t know if they do or not, but we’ve sold five or six just in the last week. Somebody must think they work.”

I pointed to the picture on the side of the box, which showed a midieval steel device with several metal spikes ready to skewer a cute little mole underneath it.

“Is it painful?” I asked. “Because that’s what I want. Something with as much pain as possible.”

Sensing the humor in my voice, the young man laughed.

“I don’t know about that. It looks pretty quick.”

One thing I’ve discovered this year is that it’s very easy to think of yourself as an animal lover…until you live in a place where you’re surrounded by pest animals. Then it’s pretty easy to hate some animals. As I’ve mentioned here, crows and raccoons have been affecting the food we’re growing. What I haven’t mentioned is the moles.

I saw the first tunnel over the winter. It was kind of cool at first, seeing the little humped trails winding around in the land near the garden shed. It quickly became not-so-cool, an ever expanding warren of destruction. When the mole(s) got into the garden area, I knew I had to so something. I bought some poison, even though it bothered me to do so, and spent a month cracking open trails and dropping bait in.

I have no evidence that I got a single one.

Meanwhile, the trails expanded. In addition to the shed area and part of the garden, they burrowed all through the side yard, the front yard, the back yard, and even part of the chicken yard. They’ve started getting into the neighbor’s yard, too. They’re everywhere.

I was at the co-op yesterday for pig feed (they’re eating 150 pounds of feed every two weeks now, plus all the scraps we give them) and chicken scratch, and decided to seek out an alternative solution to the mole problem.

It is safe to say that I reached a point of hatred for the moles, even though my logical side understood they were just doing their thing, and not out to destroy our property.

“I’ll take it,” I said.

Back home, I set the trap over one of the tunnels that seems to get longer almost every night. The trap has a series of sharp metal spikes that are spring-loaded. To set it, you press down part of an active tunnel, load the spikes, and position it over the pressed-down ground. When the mole tries to push the ground up to fix the tunnel, the springs pop and release the spikes.

Voila, mole-kebab is served.

It’s brutal, but so is life.

Once the trap was ready, I went to work on fencing off a section of chicken yard for the toddlers. As I was putting welded wire on the gate, I caught sight of Tom Cullen hunkered down in the yard, staring intently at the ground. I remembered what Robyn had told me on Friday, that she’d seen Tommy and Joe Bob digging furiously in the yard near the mole tunnels.

I grabbed a shovel and went over to the cat. Sure enough, the ground in front of him was moving, pop pop pop!, up and down like there was something digging around underneath. I waved at Robyn — she was in the computer room, and I could see her through the window — to come out and look. When she’d seen it, I knew it was time.

“I’m going to kill it, Bessie,” I said, and raised the shovel.

I stuck the shovel into the earth a little behind the moving part and hopped on it. When I did, an earthworm shot all the way out of the ground like it had been fired from a gun. Robyn squealed and ran away across the yard as best she could, hands clapped over her ears for reasons known only to her.

A flip of the shovel to turn up the ground, and the mole rolled out. It wriggled around slowly, seeking a way back into the comforting darkness.

Drawing on a youth misspent in arcades in the 1980’s, I whacked the mole with the shovel once and it was still. It has been transferred out back, where it is currently undergoing conversion to pork chops.

One down, God only knows how many to go.

I was looking for this song yesterday, because I loved it when it came out. To my surprise, there’s a pretty nifty bit of trivia at the beginning that I had no idea about.