Disappearing chicken mystery... solved!

Our chicken population has been mysteriously and steadily shrinking over the past month.  This has happened to us before, but not since we gave up our free-range dreams and put the chickens behind portable electric poultry netting. 

The plus side of being a free range chicken - volunteering for the road trip

In the past we have had chickens carried off by coyotes and local dogs.  Something, probably a raccoon, once ate toes off some of the young chickens while they were sleeping in the brooder porch (I know, awful, isn't it?). 

But these are full grown chickens, living behind electric fencing.  And we were still finding piles of feathers on the ground.

Farmer Boy came bursting into the house the other day and shouted "I figured it out!  I saw it in action!  It's a hawk!!"  I could not believe it... a hawk, taking full-grown chickens.  Sure sign of a drought.

We found this little guy in the woods a few years ago, struggling to fly.  How could something that starts out this cute become a killing machine?

Now this is not an easily solved problem.  We had not been planning to fence the top of the chicken area... it is really big, and how would we make that portable, or even get under there to manage the birds, and... ugh.

We have not yet decided on the solution, but I think we are down to two.  One is to move them into the planned covered-garden-perimeter-poultry run.  The other is to get a livestock guardian dog dedicated to them. 

Puppy, or massive farm project... hmmmm....

Somebody had a third idea.  Ahem.

Wild Turkeys

Stephen discovered a large flock of wild turkeys (technically called a rafter of turkeys) on our property recently. I was excited because we do not raise turkeys yet, so we still have to buy Thanksgiving and Christmas birds. Wild turkey for Thanksgiving dinner - how fitting!

Unfortunately (for me, not for the turkeys), turkey hunting season is in the spring. Good thing the folks in Plymouth lived before government regulations on hunting. Not that they were unfamiliar with the problems of a heavy-handed government...

Anyway, here are the birds. Ugly but in a really cool kind of way.

Garden

Oh my, three months since the last post. Yes, it has been a full and happy summer.

While Stephen has had many new projects on the farm these past few months, my main farm project has been planting a much bigger garden. As I've written, Stephen enclosed a little more than 1/4 acre for us last spring. We got some planted, but it was previously pasture, so there was a lot of work to do to break the ground.

In August, Stephen took over the ground breaking part (phew!) and now we are moving along quickly. At this point we have about 1500 square feet planted, and are probably 1/4 of the way done. Of course we want to feed ourselves, but we are also planning to sell vegetables at the Bastrop Producer's Market.

The kids and I plant mostly in the morning after breakfast and before school. After dinner I like to go out and sit in a chair in the garden and just look.

I still squeal like a 5 year old to see things like this (our first sugar snap pea):



We have marauders in the garden periodically. A rabbit systematically helped itself to our bean babies. This picture is taken half way up a 40 foot row, the rest of the row behind me was wiped out too.



Here's what fills the row where there you see no green above:



Thankfully I read that tabasco sauce mixed with water and sprayed on the leaves deters rabbits. It works! That's why we still have some left.

They pilfered a cabbage plant too. Here's a happy cabbage:



And a missing neighbor!



Yesterday I was marveling at how green everything in the garden is. We are in a serious drought and most of the farm is dry and yellow, but our wonderful soaker lines keep the veggies green.





We do have bursts of color here and there...

My son is crazy

I've mentioned the rat snakes in the hen house before. More than once. Big stinkers. Hungry. Farmer Boy chased one or two out last month, but one time decided the fastest way to deal with it was catch it! He knocked on the back door and here is what I saw! Don't worry, they are not venomous. Is he brave or what?

Yet more baby birds

As you know, we live on a farm. We have domesticated animals. We have lots of wildlife. You'd think with all these acres, we would have some "humans only" space, even just right outside the house. Say, on the front porch, for example.

Well...

First there are the dogs. The cool concrete is very soothing in a hot Texas summer. Especially when you've just taken a nice dip in the pond then rolled in the dust.

Then the chickens. Doorsteps are great places to roost on. Rocking chair arms give a fine vantage point for surveying the lay of the land (aka the front yard).

And of course, there's the wildlife. We do have trees, quite a lot for Texas. But as I've written, we have already had a nestful of babes born in a hanging flower basket over the front porch this spring.

Around the time they were born, we noticed some swallows rebuilding a nest that had been inadvertently knocked off the house around Christmastime, probably due to Christmas lights. This nest had had two sets of babies born in it each summer we'd been here, so we were sad. We needn't have worried.

After the first fledglings from the flower basket headed off for adulthood, these scrawny cuties started peeping from the rebuilt swallow nest whenever they heard the squeak of the front door:



That picture was taken on May 21st, from our open front door.

Here they are on June 3:



You can imagine what the porch underneath the nest (yes, almost directly in front of our door) looks like.

Today I went out and they were gone. All "growed up" in a whopping 2 weeks. But never fear! We are not baby bird-less yet! For we have another hanging flower basket. Yes, now it too has a nest therein.

I sneaked a peak, and look who's ready to get a-growin...



So if you come to our house and wonder why we have two completely dead flower baskets hanging over our porch, now you'll know it's because they are actually bird nurseries, and bird mamas don't take kindly to having their babies' rooms flooded.