9 ~ Chicken-wildlife conflict

A few days ago, I returned home from an afternoon errand and only five of my six laying hens, which had been free-ranging in the yard, gathered round in greeting.  Although it’s not unusual for one hen to wander off to explore on her own, I noticed that the others were a bit jumpy, flinchy.  I looked around the yard, with no luck, and latched onto hope.  At nightfall, still only five returned to roost in their coop – and for certainty of chicken loss, that’s the equivalent of a receiving a dead fish wrapped in newspaper (“It’s a Sicilian message… Luca Brasi sleeps with the fishes.”)

 Lacking evidence from which to parse the identity of the raider (e.g., no pile of feathers found yet), my suspects include a covert daylight ambush by a coyote or bobcat (there are few foxes here, due to the abundance of coyotes).  Both are generally, but not exclusively, nocturnal.  Another possibility is death from above – one of the local bald eagles or red-tailed hawks. 

Late afternoon on the day after the hen’s disappearance, I was prepping the back garden for some early spring planting, and coyotes started chorusing from the woods just beyond.  Coyotes often call here - in the evening; it is unusual to hear them with the sun still in the sky.  And I have never before heard them so close to the house. Canis latrans immediately moved up the list of prime suspects.   

My hens are Dominiques, the oldest breed known from America. The breed was developed during the colonial period in what is now Quebec (then New France), and reached the United States before, in fact, there was a United States. They are great layers, but many breeds are, and when choosing my chicks last year, additional reasons steered me to Dominiques.  Among them are my soft spots for the traditional, and for connection – I share a French Canadian ancestry with the hens.  Dominiques are also beautiful, and reputed to be friendly, winter hardy, good foragers, and savvy around predators.  On the last point, no one is perfect. 

This is one of the most dangerous, predatory times of year for hens. First, the raspberry thickets in which mine like to hide have not yet developed.  Second, hibernating prey, such chipmunks and ground squirrels, aren’t yet fully roused from their slumbers.  And prey that are active all year, such as rabbits and pheasants, are at their lowest (and savviest) populations of the year.  All winter they’ve been getting eaten down, or dying from other causes, and haven’t yet started reproducing.  Finally, the local coyotes probably have pups nursing in their den now (and so the mother needs more nourishment), and the bald eaglets in the nest down the road recently hatched. Just when they have more mouths to feed, predators face an acute prey bottleneck.  Not good news for hens.

I have three options to resolve a coyote problem, barring a search and destroy mission (not going there). Each will also help to varying degrees if the culprit is a bird of prey.  One is a large outdoor dog (especially a protecting breed, such as Great Pyrenees), which I don’t have at present.  Another is to keep the hens confined to their pen and coop, in lockdown.  But they love foraging in the yard and scratching in the garden (and I love gardening with them).  It’s a quality versus quantity of life calculation. For example, granted, cats that spend their entire lives indoors live a few years longer on average, but what sort of dull life is it (leaving aside the issue of the impact of outdoor cats on wild birds)?

A third approach is some assistance from a scarecrow, and it’s what I’ve adopted for the moment.  I made one yesterday, from an old shirt and jeans, stuffed with dead leaves.  He now stands guard in the back yard, the area nearest the woods edge and the recent coyote chorusing. We’ll call him Jughead, since his noggin is an old ceramic jug I found under the farmhouse porch (supplemented with a clipping from National Geographic - lion-tailed macaque from India).  To boost his coyote deterrent value, I peed on Jughead before I stood him up.  Anointed him.  I will continue to anoint him, refresh his pant legs with human scent, when I’m in the yard and the urge arises.

Scarecrows aren’t a long-term solution. Predators eventually figure them out. I’m supplementing this deterrence, at least until we get through the bottleneck, by liberating the hens to forage only when I’m working in the yard or garden (most afternoons these days).  At least until I get that dog…

The hens and I were out on this arrangement yesterday afternoon, in the front yard, when I noticed a red-tailed hawk perched across the road, watching us…  It proved remarkably resistant to departure – perching fast through shouts, arm waving and hand clapping (I confess to having felt some empathy with farmers of yore - and some maybe not-so-yore - who would have taken a shotgun to that “chicken hawk”; and this from a former falconer and lifelong raptor researcher and conservationist).  So the jury is still out, and perhaps a second scarecrow should go in the front yard.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with some beauty.  While my hens are the same breed, and hatched on the same day at the same hatchery, of course they are individuals, with unique personalities.  And this extends to their eggs.  I just collected four eggs from the coop, each its own subtly different shade of color.  Works of laid, then found, art - individually and collectively:

Update on my larder:  I have run out of some staples, such olive oil, white sugar and white flour.  But hope and inspiration come from the mountains of Pakistan, which I’ll cover in an upcoming post.

What I’m reading and can recommend:

Lost in the Driftless: Trout Fishing on the Cultural Divide, by Tim Traver (2017)

Perhaps mainly of local interest to those here in the Driftless Area, but the book also covers natural resource issues beyond southwestern Wisconsin, such as trout areas of New England and northern Michigan.  It’s an intriguing, well-written exploration of the cultural conflict between local, born-here trout fisherman, who often fish with live bait and eat what they catch, and out-of-town (and generally urbanite) catch-and-release fly fishermen.  The latter have access to more political power, and frequently impose their will for more restrictive trout fishing regulations, despite science that shows that trout fishing by humans, regardless of the method, has a comparatively minor impact on trout populations.  The book is giving me a better understanding of the area in which I live.