I thought I’d update you on our coyote problem. A hint: it’s been solved! To explain that, I’d like to introduce you to our friend Al. No, not my Dad, Al; although he is definitely a friend of the farm, but Al T. – sharp shooter extraordinaire. (WARNING: This post contains content that may be considered objectionable by some. If you are sensitive to talk about guns or hunting, or if you don’t want a kid to read about guns or the issues of predation and its control, just stop reading right now.)
When you walk onto the porch in the afternoon and the resident road runner is sheltering under the patio table, you might have a coyote problem. My first exposure to coyotes and road runners may be similar to yours: Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. You can see them here as they appeared in the “To Beep or Not to Beep” episode from the Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies shorts (created by Chuck Jones and Michael Maltese). Every time I see our Road Runner, the theme song goes through my head… and it will for you now too! If you’re missing out, here’s a link to a YoutTube with the original song: https://youtu.be/OwYQsZuh2CM . Anyway, we are having issues with one coyote in particular. Here’s the deal…
We’ve done this at least once before, but it does bear revisiting. What’s your opinion? Mine, you ask? They are evil little marauders, scavengers of chicken food, and eaters of all good plants. Grrrr. I hate them. And. They’re ugly.
To the novice Christmas participant, this may seem a rather late greeting; however, we are still in the midst of Christmas. There are twelve days, you know, leading up to Epiphany on the 6th – this is Christmastide! So we are still wishing you joys of the season. And, tonight, hoping that your New Year’s Eve revels are safe and fun, spent with your close family and/or friends. As for us, we’ll be home with the chickens, ducks, geese, goats, dogs and cats. Probably in bed by 8:30 pm Arizona Time.
Tomorrow is the 2nd Sunday in the season of Advent. I suppose the Christmas season is going to go as quickly as the rest of this year seemed to. We blinked and it was December. How is such a thing possible? It may be better than dragging along slowly during a pandemic. Perhaps others’ year has poked along, not ours though.
You know that Sue is always working on projects, right? This past week, she moved up the Ranada Inn. There’s always a story right? Here we go…
One night, recently, when Sue was walking Chase before bed – or was it early in the morning while it was still dark? I can’t remember, but the point is, there was a Skunk in the Ranada Inn! The chickens didn’t realize it until the light from Sue’s flash-light swept across the Inn. Then they couldn’t believe what they saw! Sue let them all out, the skunk ran away, then she had to corral them all back in because it was dark. This all made Sue want to raise up the Inn and put chicken wire on the bottom.
So, one morning, Sue stood the Inn on it’s side, put on the struts, and wired it up with chicken wire. Dad was here, so he was able to help hold the 2×4’s in place while Sue screwed them in. Mom and I must have been off shopping!
Then she set it down on some hay bales to raise it up off the ground. This will keep the chickens up out of harms way.
The final edition was this stepping stone for Mr. P. He felt it was a bit too far to jump up there. He doesn’t seem to be having any problems getting inside, so much be working fine. On warm days, the chickens enjoy hanging out underneath int he shade. Eventually, we’ll get some cinder blocks and set the Inn on them a bit more permanently. Sue was just mentioning to me today that she hasn’t seen the skunk, nor evidence of the skunk, in the last few days. Perhaps he has moved along to more welcoming pastures.
That’s the story for today. We’ll have more later, I’m sure. Until then, as always~ Thanks for reading!
Today we have a game for you. As we all recover from our Thanksgiving day activities (yes, we’re still recovering), I thought that a fun little seek and find game would be an easy activity for everyone.
So here we go! We did planter number two of six. I promise we won’t do this in-depth for each of them, but since we didn’t do a lot with the first one, we – well, I wanted to give you step by step.
We started with Sue unscrewing the outside panels.
Then we pried off the panels from the concrete. They came of relatively easily compared the the first one. This time the concrete seemed to pull away from the wood as it dried.
Then we followed the same steps for the inside.
We had a bit more difficulty extricating the panels from the inside.
We ended up leaving the last part of the final panel. We just couldn’t get it out from the corners. Since we knew it wouldn’t be able to used for a third time anyway, we just decided to leave it. It’ll just compost over time.
Here it is though. Our finished product. You can see the midline there where we had a week between pourings. Came out pretty nice.
In the future, we’ll just post them as wee finish them. Like we would normally with any other project. We have a few posts in the pipeline, so even though it is Thanksgiving weekend and my folks are here for a short visit, we’ll be posting as often as we can. Until then – here’s wishing you the best of Thanksgiving you can possibly have this year – plus, as always~ Thank you for reading!
It’s been fall now for a while. We even had some cold weather to prove it. Now we’re having late spring weather. Cool mornings and evenings, exceeding warm by midday. Even though our temps are, um, temperamental. There are still some pretty nice scenes of fall around here. We’re just gonna share some with you today.
We al have them. Lately we’ve all had to really concentrate on being positive. We’re hanging in and hanging on. Everyone is being impacted by so many factors. Did you know that hermit crabs in Thailand are facing a shell shortage? One national park made an appeal to the public to send shells. They think that the downturn in tourists visits may have contributed to the boom in the hermit crab population. Directly related to the times. I’m hoping, if you’re reading this, that you are not searching for “shell-ter” [see the article I’ve linked] and that you’re doing quite well as things heat up, or rather cool down and the virus begins to rear its ugly head again. The weather brings about all sorts of interesting things. Most recently, many of our chickens have been molting. Thing you’re having a bad day?
