Hay, You!

Lot of water over the dam since the last time I wrote. We’ve frozen some pesto and some Granny Puzo Sauce, put up some jam and froze not enough blackberries, started taking the sheep out to eat early each evening (outside the electric fence, that would be), and my submission to the Fair won the third place ribbon in the class called Flower Arrangement Under Five Inches, In A Thimble. I have heat rash AND hay rash, so you can tell it’s still summer.

The hay arrived this morning, fifty bales of first cutting, which ought to see us through the winter. The neighbor brothers who raise it and deliver it have at least one gas well between them, which makes me wonder why they still bother to sell hay. I guess they like it. I am reminded of the old Midwestern joke about the farmer who wins the million dollar lottery and is asked what he’s going to do with all that money. “Well,” he says, “I guess I’ll just keep farming til it’s all gone.” If I had a million dollars, that’s what I’d do.

So the hay room is full, the jam shelf is populated and the heating oil has been paid for. That means all we have to do is lay in a few cords of firewood and we’ll be ready for winter.

Benji Met the Bear

The dogs and I were just out for our morning walk around the North Orchard trail, and naturally the corgis had run on ahead while Murphy, the Labrador, and I came lumping along behind. There was some rustling and crashing in the thick undergrowth where we never brush hog any more because we’re letting the forest come back up there between us and the road, and I started to worry the corgis were messing with another groundhog, so when I reached the hairpin bend in the trail, I yelled, “Corgis! Corgis!” And both dogs come back around the next bend, and about 20 feet from them in the deep brush behind the raspberries, up comes a big old black head and shoulders. The dogs were mighty surprised, and Medwards offered to advance, so I started hissing powerfully and the dogs came back to me, and then me and all three of them lit out for the other side of the hill as fast as we could get through the brush.

I have no illusion that that bear meant us harm—the subsequent crashing indicated that he was running for the road while we were running away from him, and I hope he did not run out in traffic without looking, but years of Scottish terriers makes me think it advisable to put the largest possible space between your dogs and your wildlife.

So. I think we can dispense with the second cup of coffee today.

Thanks to yosemitehikes.com for the image. Now just picture that fellow chest deep in berry bushes.

Surprise Visitor

John came home one day this week with a Great Horned Owl that had gotten hit by a car and was nursing a bum wing and leg. He was on his way to a client meeting when he spotted the poor little guy on the shoulder of the road, so the owl rode to the meeting in John’s lap, and then transferred to a cardboard box donated by the client. (Side note: you have to love a building designer who shows up to your kitchen renovation carrying a piece of saved wildlife.)

We called the Game Commission and they said an officer would call us, but time went by and none did, so I left a message at the raptor rehab about 25 minutes from here. Then the phone rang, and the Very Cranky Game Officer, who was sitting at the intersection about a mile south of here, demanded to know where the owl was, and then whether I had made clear to the dispatcher that the owl was in my possession, and then the gender of the dispatcher who had supplied him with the false impression that there was a Great Horned Owl lying in a state of distress along Route 29 in Dimock. Although the VCGO would not confirm, it appears that he drove an hour to get here from the regional office, and maybe that’s why he was pissed.

He was not a great deal nicer in person, but he did take the owl off to a rescue center, saving me the trouble.

It was a real treat to see such a beautiful animal up close, and in our subsequent research we found out that where a big, mean game officer has 60 pounds per square inch crushing power in his hands, a Great Horned Owl has 500 pounds per square inch, enabling them to catch and eat animals two-thirds their size. I just wish we had called the nice lady from the raptor rehab first (she called back right after the owl left). Because as it is, I feel like we narced out the little guy to the cops.

And, for the record, if I thought I could get Officer Sunshine out of the building for two hours by neglecting to mention that the owl was resting comfortably in a box on somebody’s porch, I would do it too.

Psalm 23

The shearer came yesterday to relieve the overburdened sheep of their four inches of very warm wool. It’s been pretty hot for weeks, so they should have been glad to be shorn, but since it involves being torn one by one from their safe place in the barn and wrestled out the door to God knows what, they were not. Roger was gone by 8 a.m., but the sheep bawled for the next hour until I left the property for a wedding, and when I returned at 5, they were still bawling. I went back out and came back home, and at 7:30 p.m., they were still out in the barnyard, yelling their heads off. Finally it occurred to me that they sounded hungry, so I went out and walked down the barnyard with them and stood still at the bottom and let them bunch up around me. After a few minutes of butting and jostling, they settled down and began to eat ravenously. It would appear that all day long, they had been too frightened and unsettled to risk lowering their heads to graze.

It got dark as I stood there, letting the sheep eat and singing that Sweet Honey in the Rock song about King David playing his harp for his sheep, and the fireflies and the lighting started to come up in and above the orchard. And I developed a new appreciation then for the twenty-third psalm:

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.
He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; He leadeth me beside the still waters;
He restoreth my soul.

I’m afraid a lot of the Bible is thrown away on folks nowadays, not because we’re all corrupt and going to hell, but because we mostly don’t have sheep. Until you have made it possible for someone to go to bed with a full stomach merely because your presence makes them feel safe enough to eat, it is hard to appreciate how nice it would be to feel that way about somebody else looking after you. But lately I’ve been thinking that getting all bent out of shape about life doesn’t seem to be making a lot of difference, just losing me sleep, so maybe my new attitude should be, “Screw it. The Lord is my shepherd.”

Frodo Has Left the Building

You can see just by looking that this White Polish Crested Rooster believes himself to be a rockstar. Even when it’s been raining on him all day, he doesn’t look like a bedraggled bird. He looks like a guy shooting a music video in the Islands.

Frodo (so called by the grandchildren of his original owners because of his aFRO hairDO) came to us as a very nice adolescent a few months back. Unfortunately, once he hit the ugly testosterone stage, he took over the flock and in addition to fighting with the older Auracana roosters and the little English cockerels, he somehow induced the Auracanas to fight among themselves. Now my oldest and most revered rooster, Paco Negro, He Of The Crippled Toes, he who survived illness as a chick and overcame, he who ruled in benevolence and equanimity all these years, is standing down in the corner of the pasture, totally bedraggled and terrified to come back up the barnyard where the rest of the flock is. Now the harmony of the flock has been shattered. Now the carefully laid out hierarchy of bird status, AKA the pecking order, which all chickens can remember in exact detail up to a flock of 30 birds, is all disarranged.

Now I am pissed.

So I got on the phone to the Extension and fifteen minutes and three phone calls later, Frodo has a date to be picked up in the parking lot of the hospital tomorrow morning to be carried off to the eastern part of the county to become part of a nice high school girl’s Polish Crested 4-H project. That kind of efficacy, my friends, is the hand of God.

So while Mr. Wonderful goes off to stand stud to a bunch of sparkling white babes, the younger Auracana has 10 days to return to good behavior. If he doesn’t, we’re taking a ride to the Poultry Auction at the fairgrounds on the 22nd. Now Playing: Bye-Bye, Birdie.

A Sad State of Affairs

I am sorry to tell you that Dolly Madison is a murderer. I am also sorry to tell you that, as predicted, Dolly hurt herself leaping from the barn one day and for two weeks could only stand up with assistance. That’s right, I went out every morning and hoisted the turkey to standing position, and then I went out in the afternoon and lifted her again. I understand what this says about me. I understand what my life has become.

The sheep would not let Dolly rest in their side of the barn, even though they don’t use it that often at this time of year because they would rather be outdoors, lying under the hemlocks. So I put Dolly in a pen closer to the house, with a tarp over it to keep the rain off. For company—and since it’s time to incarcerate the English hens and practice birth control for them so we don’t end up with even more English chickens—I put a handful of English in the pen too. They may well be the same ones that lived in the bunny crate with her last spring when they were all infants. I also added another hen—Hickety Pickety, a black yearling who liked to lay her eggs in the hay feeder in the sheep room, and whom I found one day hanging headfirst down out of the feeder with a paralyzed leg. At first I thought it was broken, but it failed to become useable again. It simply continued to stick straight out in front of her. But Hickety Pickety got around remarkably well on her wings and good leg, and it was obvious she wanted to live, so I let her.

After two weeks of physical therapy in the Paraplegic Poultry Ward, Dolly was able to stand on her own. The timing was good because I had to go away for two nights on business, and John was spared the task of standing the turkey up each day. The second morning I was away, he called to say that Dolly had gotten up on her own and had used her regained powers of health and locomotion to walk over and stand on Hickety Pickety, who had come down out of the coop for breakfast. Then she stepped off, took the hen by the neck and shook her hard. John return the poor hen to the coop, where she died overnight of her injuries.

Today it is almost a week later. John and I brought down a calf hutch his mother kindly let us borrow from her farm, and I cut out the doorsill so Dolly can walk in. She did not, of course. But last night I made her walk in, so she gets the idea of sleeping in there out of the rain. Unfortunately, as of yesterday, she needs help once again to stand up. I am no longer convinced that her problems are injury-based. I think she may just be engineered to have been eaten last November, not to be still walking around. Her suspension is not adequate to the tasks required of it at one year of age. So now this irritating bird, who killed another animal with a disability almost identical to her own, is suffering the legacy of her own genetics. And eventually I may have to decide what to do about it.

Chez Dolly, Or The Problem of Turkey Housing

We are having serious issues of turkey mechanics. Dolly Madison cannot get in or out of the hen room of the barn by herself because the door jamb is about three feet off the ground, she weighs maybe 45 pounds, and her wings are about 6 inches long and molting anyway. The barn foundation is concrete, with nowhere to mount a ramp. Dolly has grown accustomed to being put in and taken out each day, which involves me bracing myself, lifting with my legs and giving her a boost onto the jamb, where she poises herself and then jumps to the other side. Going into the barn, this is fine because the drop is only 18 inches. Going out, she invariably lands on her feet in the barnyard and then flips ars over tea kettle from the sheer momentum of her giant bulk striking the earth. It’s only a matter of time before she gets hurt.

I was hoping Dolly could sleep in the sheep room (next door to the hen room) because it is at ground level. But the sheep harass her and will not let her stay in there. I tried the old dog house, which is just the right size for a turkey shed, but she’s a little too wide for the doorway. Next I am going to call my mother in law and ask whether they have any calf hutches that are so banged up they can’t keep calves in them any more. If we can keep the sheep out, that might work—sheep are pushier than you might think. Otherwise I am going to have to build a mini-shed-roof off the side of the barn above the spot where Dolly sleeps on the ground when I don’t put her in the barn manually, just codifying what is already the de facto turkey bed.

Farming is just an endless series of making things up and trying to string together a solution out of a pile of assorted doohickeys lying around the yard. If I didn’t have the family’s native engineering impulse, I would hate it.