Category: aminals.

aminals. castle frostbite. parenting. writing.

newsletter from castle frostbite, july 2012.

Oh, hey there, Internets!

Team Munchkin Wrangler had a busy week and a relaxing weekend. The kids enjoyed their science summer camp, and I enjoyed my five morning Dadcations. Lyra was in preschool day camp, which let out at noon, and Quinn’s camp let out at 3. I dropped them off in the mornings, went into Hanover or West Leb to find a spot to write for a few hours, and then came back to pick up Lyra at noon to take her home. With the return trip in the afternoon to fetch Quinn, I did a ton of driving back and forth. A tank of gas usually lasts for two weeks with my regular driving patterns, but last week I blew through a full tank by Thursday.But hey—the kids had fun, I got some time off, and that dinosaur juice was combusted for a noble purpose.

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We’re back to the regular routine this week, except for Friday when I get to go to Boston for the weekend and attend Readercon. A bunch of my writer friends will be there, so there will be plenty of geekery, shop talk, and consumption of adult beverages.

Cluckheim Keep still stands unmolested, and the chickens are reasonably happy with the new arrangement. With the way our handyman overbuilt the run, I don’t see any fox or raccoon getting into it. The only worry I have is black bear—friends of ours thirty miles away have had a persistent member of the species break into their shed and then their barn repeatedly to get to their chickens and feed. The run is ridiculously sturdy, but bears are ridiculously strong, and a determined black bear would be a challenge to keep out. The run is close enough to the house that I’m counting on hearing any demolition attempts and being able to come downstairs to, uh, strongly discourage Mr. Bear. We had one on the property two years ago, but he hasn’t returned since then. We don’t have bird feeders out, but you never know.

The fiction-writing business is coming along as always. A while ago, I had the brilliantly stupid idea to write two novels in tandem, and then I started playing with some ideas for a third one. The Military SF novel stands at 90% complete, the Urban Fantasy detective novel is 50% done, and the YA novel is at 30% or so. It’s nice to be able to switch gears and work on something else for a bit when you get stuck with one novel, but it sucks when you’re stuck on all of them. But things are progressing at a good clip now. (I’ve set up shop in the attic temporarily, where it’s kind of hot but very quiet, which may have something to do with the increased output lately.) I will have three finished novels to shop around later this year, in three different genres. Or I could just combine them all and mix chapters, see what kind of response I get from agents…

aminals. castle frostbite.

desperate times, desperate measures.

The fox is still out there. The chickens have been cooped up in their house for three days now, and they are getting a little fidgety. This weekend, the temps will hit the 90s again, and then Cluckheim Keep will be too warm during the day. So we had to commission a quick emergency project—a fox-proof 120 square-foot outdoor addition to Cluckheim Keep. Thankfully, our handyman is really good with a table saw.

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(That bottom right shot shows the residents supervising the labor force.)

It’s incomplete, but it will be finished at some point tomorrow. The mesh that encloses the run is 19-gauge galvanized hardware cloth, skirted two feet out from the run and staked down to prevent digging. The corner posts are 4x4s, and the roof is thick plywood that will get a tarpaper cover. It weighs about twice as much as the shed. I don’t see anything short of a bear getting in there, and that bear would have to put some serious shoulder into it to break it. One thing is for certain—the foxes won’t be able to pull off any snatch & run attacks anymore.

The chickens are happier free-ranging, obviously, but they’re not happy at all when they get chewed on by a fox, so this will have to be a compromise. With the extra bill for materials and labor, however, those eggs are going to cost us about ten bucks a piece. On the plus side–if we ever decide to give up on the chicken thing, that run will make  a great little garden house.

aminals. in the news.

fox two aftermath.

I got Chicken #8 back yesterday, but it took me a few hours. She was hiding in the underbrush and wouldn’t come out, fleeing from me whenever I tried to approach her. The other chickens were all safe in Cluckheim Keep.

Foxes are smart animals. They remember the location of an easy buffet like a pasture full of free-ranging chickens. I didn’t want to lose any more of the flock, but I had to get the straggler back. So I let them all out to free-range again and coaxed them over to the location of Trauma Chicken with some treats. Sure enough, the straggler heard the flock and rejoined them in a hurry. Of course, they didn’t want to go back into the chicken house just yet, so I had to spend two hours out in the rain, standing guard over the flock with the shotgun. At nightfall, they all went inside as usual, and I locked the door and went inside to dry off. The things I do for my poultry.

Later, I was poking around on the Backyard Chickens discussion forum for some ideas on fox-safe runs when I came across a story that made me shake my head in disgust.

When you read the “Predators and Pests” forum at Backyard Chickens, you’ll quickly learn that flock wipes are no rarity. Foxes in particular will stash their kills and work in pairs, and a hungry pair of foxes with kits waiting back at the den can take a flock of twenty chickens in minutes. Foxes are pretty much a constant risk to free-range chickens, and they can get into fairly complex enclosures. What was more irritating to read about, however, was the sheer number of incidents people recounted where free-roaming neighbors’ dogs had killed some or all of their chickens. From the accounts, that’s a pretty common event, and a lot of dog owners just plain refuse to take responsibility for their animals or pay restitution. After all, they’re “just chickens”. (Tell that to the little kid who lost all of her pet chickens to a neighbor dog while she had to watch the whole thing.)

Anyway, one of the posts was a link to this article. To recap: young woman in Durango, CO owns a lab/Great Dane mix. She flies home to Michigan for a family visit, but doesn’t want to pay the extra fees to fly her dog too, so she leaves him in the care of a pet sitter. The pet sitter’s roommate lets the dog out without a leash, and the dog runs off the property, which isn’t fenced in. Dog goes to a neighbor’s farm and proceeds to attack and kill the neighbor’s grandkid’s chickens. Family friend who happens to be at the farm shoots the dog dead after trying to scare him off by yelling doesn’t work.

Dog owner is shocked and amazed to find out that shooting a dog molesting livestock is perfectly legal. Read through the Comments thread on that article for the stereotypical granola soundbites of “needless killing”, “armed rednecks who feel the need to carry a gun around in January”, “shoulda fired a warning shot”, and so on. Now she made a Facebook group trying to get enough signatures to change or amend the law to “give more rights to dogs and their owners.”

*blink*

Don’t get me wrong, I love dogs. We own five of the little stinkers. But I know that we are fiscally and legally responsible for everything they do. If I let them escape out of neglect or inattention, and they run to a neighbor’s property and start killing chickens, I would not fault the neighbor for shooting my dogs. The buck stops with the dog’s owner, and nobody else.

What the hell else is the owner of the chickens supposed to do? You have a large dog (a lab/Great Dane mix is a big animal), engaged in killing your livestock, and not obeying shouted commands to stop. Should you try to physically restrain the animal—which is already in “kill” mode—and risk getting mauled? Should you let him kill all the chickens and then hope you can locate the owner of that dog to ask for restitution? Should you wait for animal control to show up, when a dog can kill an entire flock of 20 or 30 chickens in less time than it takes for you to make the call?

I just can’t fathom the level of self-absorption and blame-shifting that would lead someone to blame the farmer who was forced to deal with the situation.

(I know that dogs are family members to most people, and that losing one hurts a lot. And yes, chickens are cheap. But tell someone who has raised a twenty-chicken flock from the “little yellow fuzzball” stage and watered, fed, and kept them safe every day for months or years only to see them all killed in two minutes for sport by an unleashed dog that they’re only worth the $2.50 a pop you paid for the chicks.)

aminals. castle frostbite.

fox two.

Another fox grabbed a chicken on the front lawn just a little while ago. I ran out, and he let go of the chicken and ran off. This time, I didn’t have a good shot, and he was running toward the public road anyway.

Two hours of patrolling and coaxing later, I have seven chickens in the chicken house, and one very traumatized chicken in the underbrush behind it. She lost a bunch of feathers and won’t let me come near her. I’ll have to see if she collects herself enough to com back to the coop. One of the araucanas is missing. That puts us at eight, seven if the injured araucana doesn’t gather herself enough to let me coop her up before nightfall.

Yeah, they’re wild animals, doing what predators do, but right now I am not feeling charitable toward foxes. I put a lot of work into those chickens.

I’ll have to go to Home Despot and buy some lumber and chicken wire for a large chicken run. It seems we have a few too many predators running around here to make free-ranging chickens a wise proposition.

aminals. castle frostbite.

dachshunds with disabilities.

After a few nighttime incidents with Elderly Dog, the Castle now sports a handful of handicapped access ramps for geriatric dachshunds:

IMG_0678IMG_0677IMG_0681There’s another contraption on the dog door that leads into the garage. It’s a nifty ramp that can be raised and lowered from the inside of the house. That makes four special handicapped access ramps in the house for the benefit of Elderly Dog, who can no longer hop over the ledges by herself.

When you have five dogs, we don’t really have a month that passes without some sort of dog-related expense. There are vaccination boosters, small and moderate injuries, regular check-ups, emergency visits…all I know is that if I had all the money we’ve spent on vet bills in a pile on my kitchen table, we could easily buy a new and not-too-shabby car and then use the rest of the cash to all go to Germany on vacation for a month. But you do what you have to do to keep your Animal-American Non-Human Companions safe and comfy.

aminals. castle frostbite.

chicken fortress.

The chickens have a new home, the mighty Cluckheim Keep.

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There are some leveling and roof issues to be worked out this weekend, but Cluckheim Keep should be reasonably fortified against predators. They can’t tunnel into it, and those walls are pretty hard to chew through.

aminals. castle frostbite. new hampshah.

it’s a northern frost toad. they eat granite.

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Miss Lyra with Tiny Toad.

That girl is absolutely fearless and non-squeamish when it comes to getting dirty and handling critters. Her brother is a bit more cautious in that respect. He would have looked at the toad, but he wouldn’t have touched it. And he wouldn’t have come running, toad between thumb and forefinger, and said, “Look what I found outside, Daddy!”

My little girl…the headstrong princess who takes a sword to the dragon to defend her play castle, and who comes inside after a day of play with scuffed knees and dirty fingernails.

aminals.

I just had to go and thumb my nose at fate.

Not two hours after I posted that thing about the joys of owning chickens and how we haven’t lost a single one yet, a fox stopped by our front yard to help himself to a free lunch.

I was upstairs and heard the birds make a ruckus, so I went downstairs to investigate. When I walked into the kitchen, I saw a fox standing on our front lawn by the tree line, right where the chickens usually hang out under the pine trees in the morning.

I ran outside and grabbed the shotgun on the way out. (I staged it next to the door with an empty chamber and the safety on just so I’d have it handy in case of predator instead of having to run upstairs and fetch it out of the cabinet. It turned out to be a good call.)

IWhen I opened the door, the fox looked over and started running. Unfortunately for him, he chose to run almost straight away from me across the leach field on the other side of our driveway. Bringing the shotgun up and pulling the trigger was almost a reflex. I hit him in the rear from about thirty yards at a full run, and that was pretty much that.

The chickens were scattered to hell and gone. I walked around calling for them, but I was pretty sure that the fox either a.) killed the whole flock before I got downstairs, or b.) scared all the chickens into setting sail for Patagonia. But as I was approaching the burn pile at the bottom of our leach field, one chicken popped its head out of the pile. I called it, and it hopped off the pile to come over to me…and four more followed it, single-file, in no particular hurry. The rest of them had scattered in the woods behind the house, but they all came back to the coop within thirty minutes.

Except for Clucky #5, that is. One of the barred rocks didn’t come back. I was hoping she had just run too far and gotten lost temporarily, but when she wasn’t back by the coop at nightfall, I had to write her off as MIA/likely KIA. Either the fox killed her in the first attack, or she went into the woods too far and got lost or fell to another predator.

So now we’re down to nine chickens.

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I took a picture of the dead fox. It’s a shame, really—it was a very pretty gray fox, and I hated having to kill it, but a single fox could, and would, have wiped out that whole coop in less time than it took for me to write the first three paragraphs of this blog post. Foxes are smart animals, and even if I had chased him off, he would have remembered the big FREE CHICKEN sign invisibly hovering above our yard, and he would have returned and taken the rest of them. I could have tried to trap it, but I didn’t have a trap handy, and the Remington was what I had in hand when I stepped out to confront him.

Again, it was a shame—too bad the chicken was lost, and too bad I had to shoot that fox. I don’t enjoy killing animals, but there was really no other way to save the rest of the birds.

So, farewell, Clucky Five. We hardly knew ye. Your sisters ate your share at dinner in your honor.

aminals. castle frostbite.

them chickens is organized.

I’m a little surprised at how much I enjoy having chickens around. Our ten chicks have turned into ten pullets that are almost fully grown adult hens now. We still have all ten of them—no accidents, predators, or other attrition, although one of them had a run-in with a dachshund that luckily only ended in some missing feathers.

They’re entertaining to watch. We have a routine in place where they get let out of their coop first thing in the morning, and they’ll wander around the property in a flock all day and eat bugs. When it starts to get dark, they’ll all come back to the coop and head upstairs to roost for the night, and all I have to do is to lock them up. I never realized how smart chickens actually are, or that they’re social birds with a flock hierarchy. I’m also amused by the way they all come running when I set foot outside—I know they have learned to associate me with food, but it still makes me feel a bit like the Chicken Whisperer.

We bought a large garden shed, eight by ten feet, to use as a chicken house. Right now they’re still in their coop, but this weekend I’ll place the coop inside the new chicken house to get them used to the new digs. They’ll weather the winter better in the shed, and they’ll be safer from predators at night.

Of course, they’ll have to lay about three thousand eggs for us to save enough in grocery store egg purchases to make up for all the chicken swag we’ve bought to get the little cluckers situated.

Owning ten laying hens is definitely something that we couldn’t have done at the old place in suburban Knoxville. Ten acres out in the country leave one some room for agricultural experiments.

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The ameraucanas have distinct plumage patterns, so they’re easy to tell apart. We’ve named all of them. The barred rocks all look the same, so they’re just about impossible to tell apart. Those are Clucky One through Clucky Five.

aminals.

a good dog.

With the current construction at Castle Frostbite, a large part of the porch area is strewn with various bits of handyman detritus. On Thursday, our old dachshund matriarch Guinevere took advantage of an open door and went out there to explore. She came back in with a three-inch gash in her chest, inflicted by a nail sticking out of a board somewhere. While she was very unconcerned about the hole in her chest, being able to look into your dog is generally a cause for owner concern, so I went to the doggie ER with her at 10pm.

Guin has always been a tough-as-nails dog. She shrugs off injuries, and getting poked with needles at the vet doesn’t even make her flinch. The vet examined her as she was on her side on the table, and she didn’t even stir when the vet poked around the wound.

“This doesn’t seem to bother her at all,” the vet said. “I bet she’d let me stitch her up with just local anesthetic instead of having to put her under.”

“You don’t know this dog,” I said. “She’d probably let you do it without any anesthetic at all.”

So they scooped her up and brought her into the surgery room in the back, and fifteen minutes later, Guin was all sutured up. When the vet brought her out, they praised her incredible stoicism.

“I clipped her nails when we were done with the stitches,” the vet tech said. “The expression on her face when she saw the clippers was all like, ‘Are you freakin’ kidding me?’ Then she just put her head back down and sighed as if to say, ‘Whatever, let’s just get this over with.”

Guin will be fifteen this year. She’s still the queen of the pack, but these days she delegates much of the perimeter security patrolling to her offspring while she takes long naps in warm and cozy spots. She gave birth to seventeen puppies, three of which are living with us. She has raided countless trash cans, and she’s the only dog I’ve ever known who has figured out how to open child safety latches on cabinets. I hope she’ll be with us for a bit longer, and we’ll miss her when she’s gone, because there’s no other dog like her. Proudly defiant, bold to the point of rashness, yet loyal and loving and entirely admirable for her almost cat-like independent spirit.

Here she is, hanging out in front of the pellet stove:

And here’s young master Henry photobombing his grandmother: