The Sheep, The Coyote, and The Farmer and His Tire Iron

So, we have a lot of coyotes around these parts. There’s lots of food for them. They eat a lot of berries and nuts and stuff, but they also eat lots of insects and little mammal critters when they can catch them, and they will eat a few fawns or a sick adult deer every year. Other than berries mostly they eat voles, moles, mice, and rabbits (rabbits are fast little suckers, though). Coyotes also like to eat lambs.

I knew when I put the sheep in the field that they are in that there are a lot of coyotes back there. I see piles of coyote poop all the time. I see paw prints everywhere too, but they are just as likely to be from monk as they are from a coyote. The poop though, is distinct. It is reddish colored, and full of seeds. So, yesterday, when I turned the corner through the hedgerow in the truck to bring the sheep their morning hay, I wasn’t all that surprised to find a coyote trapped in the electronet paddock with them.

He got in thinking he was going to get a tasty morsel, like a ten pound new born lamb. Instead, he found a flock of 175 pound ewes that would pound him to pulp if he forced them too (their preference would be to run for the hills, of course). I imagine that initially, when the coyote got into the paddock, things were pretty exciting, but by the time I came around the corner, the coyote and the sheep had brokered a truce. The sheep were ignoring him completely. Most were just lounging around near the feeder. A few were standing at the feeder eating.

When the coyote saw me coming, he went ape shit, sprinting from one end of the paddock to the next. It never occurred to him to jump the fence, and he really didn’t want to get shocked (again, it was very clear), so he didn’t try to go through it. He just sprinted from one end to the next, back and forth.

From inside the truck, I did a quick head count and all the sheep were present and accounted for, so, relieved, I then said to myself, “Son of a bitch. There’s a coyote in the paddock, and I need to get him out!” My next thought was, “Goddammit [apologies to the religious folks] I need a friggin’ gun already.” (I’ve been saying that since we moved here nearly six years ago and so far haven’t really needed one [nor did I need one yesterday]). I’ve never herded a coyote before, so I wasn’t sure how that was going to go. What if instead of running away from me, he felt cornered and ran at me? What is a boy to do? Be tough, that’s what! I might not have had a gun, but I was in my truck so that meant I had a tire iron. If he rushed me, I would smash his brain in.

So, I got out of the truck and went around to the passenger side and got the tire iron out of its little compartment, and stepped into the paddock. The coyote was on the far side. My plan was to open up the electronet on the side he was on and then get out of the way and hopefully have him run out. I was certainly not worried the sheep would follow him. Unfortunately, the fence was still on. I needed to walk over to his side in the corner on the side of the paddock that he was on to turn the fence off before I could (would) open it up.

When that coyote — he/she was beautiful, by the way — saw me walking its way, it went really, totally ape shit, and started a full-out gallop back and forth. He was covering 164 feet in about six strides. It was awesome. Then, feeling too much pressure, he said screw it and hit the netting. He pulled up just before slamming into it, so he didn’t hit it full force. As soon as he hit the netting and I saw he wasn’t going to take the netting down and he wasn’t going to get through, I got really nervous. What if he gets tangled?! Oh shit, don’t get tangled! If he got tangled I would have two choices, try to pin him down with my knees and one hand and bash his head with the tire iron until he was dead, or run up to the neighbor’s and rouse them out of bed to get their gun. I didn’t like either idea, but I definitely preferred the latter to the former. Regardless which choice I made, you can’t (shouldn’t) untangle a live coyote from electronet. So, “Oh shit, don’t get tangled!”

I had no choice, so I kept moving towards the corner where the charger is, which unfortunately was where the coyote was. Thankfully, the coyote backed up, backed up, yanked, pulled, and got him/herself free. It doesn’t take a lot to get totally tangled in electronet (don’t ask me how I know), so that was a good bit of luck. Then, once free, off s/he went towards the other end.

“Just jump the friggin’ fence, you fool!” I said in my head as I kept making my way toward the corner while watching the coyote. But, alas, no, it slammed right back into the fence on the other side. This time, however, he hit the fence exactly at the corner, where two fiberglass rod end posts of two separate sections of electornetting came together. Fiberglass gets brittle when it is cold, and yesterday morning was cold. When I heard one of the posts break, the popping sound it made sounded exactly like the electric pop when the fence shocks something, like the nose of a wet canine, really good, so I wasn’t sure what happened. The only thing I was sure of was that the coyote had gotten out. Within  a few seconds it was at the other end of the field and had disappeared into the woods.

I checked the fence, cursed that the rod was broken (I can buy a replacement), and then put my tough man tire iron back in the truck and fed the sheep. While they were eating  I circled slowly around them, looking them up and down. Nobody was injured. All was well.

Off I went to do the rest of my chores.

So, now what?

Jen suspects that the experience was unpleasant enough that the coyote will not be back. I am hopeful that that is true. I also think that the coyote food bank is still pretty full, so s/he probably isn’t hungry enough to try again. However, if more than one coyote had gotten into the paddock, they could have brought down one of the ewe lambs (about 100 pounds) easy enough. At the very least more than one would have attempted to bring one down, meaning I would have had a very badly injured sheep on my hands.

After a lot of deliberation, I decided not to move the sheep back over to the home farm where there is less coyote pressure, but where I would run the risk of rams taking down the electronet because I wouldn’t be able to keep the breeding groups far enough apart.

I hope I didn’t make the wrong decision, and writing this up has made me want to go make sure there isn’t a coyote in the paddock with the sheep, but it is only 4:30, so there are still two hours until daylight, which means that even if I go over now, a coyote, or a whole pack, might get in between now and dawn, which as I understand it, is one of their preferred hunting times.

What if I had had a gun? Should I have shot the coyote? I have written about this on the blog before, but only briefly, so I will state my position again. I am reluctant, from an ecological standpoint, to kill animals at the top of the food chain, unless those animals are being particularly troublesome. As we all know, the shape of the food “chain” is actually a pyramid. There are lots and lots and lots of critters at the bottom of the chain, but very few, population-wise, at the top. Killing even one of those at the top can tip the balance of the entire micro-ecology (the backside of the mountain and surrounding fields of the farm). For example, what if that coyote was a pack leader and I killed it? The pack dynamics would change. What if the new leader really liked trying to eat sheep, but had had this desire kept in check by the now displaced (because dead) pack leader? What if the pack leader was a tough SOB and was the sole reason that that particular pack had been controlling the turf of the fields on which I have had livestock, including tasty little baby pigs, with no trouble at all, even yesterday when a coyote actually got into the sheep paddock? What if one of the rival packs displaced the dead coyote’s pack because that tough SOB was dead and the rival pack had a penchant for eating little pigs and working as a pack to bring down adult sheep?

The reality is that in spite of what happened yesterday, the farm is in good ecological balance. The predator population respects, generally-speaking, my electronet, or, it has no interest in what is inside of it because there is plenty outside of it. Of course, if I go out there today and there is a dead or injured sheep or that coyote is in the paddock again, or there is evidence that it tried to get in, then I have a problem. But, even then, my response will not be to trap and/or kill the coyote. It will be to move the sheep, and wait and see what happens next season.

Keep in mind when dealing with top of the food chain critters that killing even one can change the whole ecological dynamics of your farm. If you are not really having any problems that is because the resident group is not causing any problems, so if you see a random coyote in the field, or even inside the fence, leave it be. Just because the coyote is inside the fence does not mean that all of a sudden you are going to have a rash of sheep predation. Look what happened yesterday. The coyote got in, realized it had made a mistake, and then stayed so far away from the sheep that the sheep, which are extremely anxious critters, were totally disinterested in it; they were acting as if it weren’t even there.

If on the other hand, your resident coyotes are aggressive livestock hunters, then by all means kill them and wait to see what the behavior of the pack that moves in to replace them is like (and there will be a next pack). You might end up in a vicious series of aggressive packs, or, the pack that moves in might not be interested in your sheep or little pigs or chickens, or whatever, and an ecological balance that works for farmer and wildlife will be established.

In spite of the length of time before dawn, my imagination has got the best of me, and I am going to check on the sheep. I still don’t have a gun, and a tire iron is awfully short, so I think I am going to throw my Rogue hoe field hoe in the truck. The handle is six feet long and the head is sharp as an axe and weighs about three pounds. I hate even the idea of it, but, never forget, those sheep, while cute and fluffy and all of that are actually little bundles — big bundles! — of money, and while I will do my best to work with my predators, those bundles of money come first.

[Note: I am back from checking on the sheep. The sheep all looked and stared at me, vacantly. In other words, all is well.]

 

Cat and Mouse

For the past five minutes, I have been watching our cat wander around the livingroom carrying a mouse in his mouth. He cannot seem to figure out what to do with it. He wants to put it down, but then changes his mind. He wants to show it to me, but then when I reach out to take it from him, he runs away. Since I started typing, he has made his decision. He batted the dead mouse around for about thirty seconds and is now eating it, head first. The crunching sound is making me cringe. I wonder how it is possible that such a thing tastes good. Well, apparently it doesn’t. He just threw up all over the floor. I’ll be right back…

OK, I’m back.

Living in a farmhouse built in 1820, I am used to living with mice, although I cannot quite get used to having them dropped, often still alive, by the cat in our bed late at night. Gregor loves to share. He is an excellent mouser, in fact, he is an excellent hunter, period. During the spring, when we are plagued with cluster flies, Gregor probably gets a third of his nutrition from eating them. He can snatch a fly out of the air as easily as you or I would catch a gently tossed baseball. His brother, Samsa, who died a few months ago of kidney failure, was a terrible mouser. I do not think he caught a single mouse in his entire life. Whenever we heard the cacophonous crash of the hunt, we could be sure that Samsa would be watching Gregor go after his prey, trotting excitedly after his brother as he crashed with abandon from one side of the room to the other, up over chairs, between book shelf and stove, under ottomans and couches, until he had the mouse trapped between his paws and then clamped in his jaws. If the mouse happened to get away from Gregor, Gregor sat and waited. And waited. An hour later he would be waiting still. Samsa having long ago lost interest would have left him to go curl up on a chair for a nap. Gregor is reckless and will leap five feet or more through the air off the back of a chair just to get up onto the fireplace mantel before realizing there is nothing really exciting up there and thumping back down on the floor. Samsa would look and ponder, calculating the distance and the height, and invariably sit back down, pretending of course, as cats are wont to do, that he never had had any interest in getting up there in the first place.

Gregor’s mouse exploits have a deep significance for me. I identify very strongly with him. As a livestock farmer I am, after all, the most canned of hunters. Whenever I hear him crashing around, or feel the cool slick fur of a mouse on my cheek or sliding down my thigh through my sleep, or whenever I see Gregor carrying (proudly, I believe) a mouse dangling from his mouth, epsecially when the mouse is alive and struggling to get free, I think about this natural cruelty. It is cruel; I don’t know what else to call it. Its naturalness does not obviate its cruelty. I wonder how and if Gregor’s cruel hunts reflect on my own. Dare I make a natural analogy? Gregor tortures his prey, for shorter or longer periods of time, depending on…depending on what, something that I might call his mood? Depending perhaps on nothing but chance or coincidence. If the mouse happens to be clamped in Gregor’s mouth in such a way that its windpipe is constricted, it suffocates and dies. If Gregor bites down too hard when he snatches it up off the ground after releasing it and letting it scamper away a few feet, he breaks its neck and it dies, sort of like Lenny in Of Mice and Men. Or, perhaps I am under-anthropomorphizing. Perhaps Gregor really is more intentional than that. Perhaps he does have moods that make him more or less cruelly playful. Perhaps he knows exactly what he is doing. And what is the mouse’s experience of all of this?

What, if any, connection is there between the tortured cruel death of prey animals by predators, whether the torture and cruelty is intentional or not, and the slaughter, humane or not, of my livestock? Is it natural for me to caringly raise livestock, load them on a trailer and drive them to their deaths? Would it be more natural if I, myself, did the killing? Is the question of nature even relevant? Gregor sees a mouse, attacks it, plays with it, kills it, and, if he is hungry, eats it. That, simply, is what he does. Why, then, is what I do so hard, so complicated, so unsimple? Why cannot I, simply, do what I do? Why must I play cat and mouse with myself? Why can’t I just accept what I do, and that it is bloody and messy and irrevocable?

 

Buzzed by a Hawk

Yesterday my sister-in-law came out with her kids to play on the farm. The kids had a great time feeding the pigs long thick stems of golden rod that is growing along the edge of the hedgerow. The pigs would pull the golden rod sticks out of the kids’ hands and then shake them around, chomping on them. Every now and then the pigs would get spooked by the kids and they would run off, barking. My little nephew loved when they barked and ran, even though it startled him. Every time they did it, he looked at me and quietly mimiced their barking. It was very cute. Once my niece held onto the golden rod for a half second too long and the pig nearly pulled her into the pasture with it. “Whoa,” she said dusting herself off as stood back up.

While we were walking away from the pigs down the field road, all of a sudden, we were buzzed by a hawk. It flew past us about ten feet away and only four feet from the ground. I think it was going after my nephew, to whom I was giving a ride on my shoulders. At the last minute, the hawk had decided he was too big. Just kidding. The hawk was obviously after the chickens, who had squawked and disappeared into the hedgerow when they spied the hawk. The hawk traveled the full length of the field at about four feet high, before gracefully gliding up to about twenty feet and settling into a tree at the end of the field.

Two days ago, I was very distressed to hear the screech of a hawk nearby while I was on my way to the pig field, and I was more distressed to see it circling overhead. To have it buzz us in the field with all of the chickens about was more distressing still. All of the chicks are present and accounted for, but I won’t be able to count the chickens until I let them out this morning.

I hope the hawk is just passing through and not making the pig field and its tasty chicken morsels its new hunting ground. If so, I’ll have to put up streamers with cut out rings from aluminum cans in an effort to keep it away from the chickens.