Things are getting better

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It appears that I broke one of my ribs in my last ride on Ezra, or rather untimely dismount. My butt, with at least a tube of Ben Gay on it, is greasier but less painful. My cough is much better, so the broken rib isn't causing my vocabulary to deteriorate that much. I finally caught the chicken eater before I was totally out of chickens. So things are beginning to look up. I find that I am much too delicate to tolerate much discomfort or adversity, so things are better.

I had decided that it was a Weasel that was causing me so much trouble. The dead birds had their heads chewed on, beak and eyes missing, skin missing off their necks, innards eaten. Not a lot missing on them, but at least one every night. The biggest thing was that there was little or no blood, and Weasels like to drink the blood. There was no signs of anything digging into the pen. It had to be small enough to get through the wire. Saturday evening I put one of my Starling funnel traps out with a pigeon in it and a small steel trap in the funnel that the Weasel would have cross over to get into the pigeon. The next morning I found the trap empty and sprung, Pigeon OK. There was a dead Chicken in the house with the same injuries as listed above. I made two Weasel boxes, set a double spring Fox trap where critters normally walk along the wall between the fence and pen. I also took the last body, hung it from the pen and put another fox trap underneath it.

I checked it last night before I went to bed and found a baby Raccoon in the trap. I say Baby, but it was born in the spring. It probably weighed about 7 pounds. I had seen the mother and two babies over at the ranch this spring. I can only guess, but it appears that something happened to the adult and the other baby. I can tell you for sure that no adults had gotten into the chicken pen. My guess is that the little fella has been on his own for some time. There just wasn't that much eaten on any of my poor chickens. No holes dug under the pen. He wasn't that skinny, so he was eating something other than my chickens. He did manage to kill about 10 of them along with some pigeons. Karen has been telling me that something was visiting in the outside "cat house" and eating the food. Apparently we had been contributing to this orphan's welfare for some time. He just got old enough to eat more than the mice that the cats dropped in the cat house and the cat food. This Chicken stuff is difficult at best with all the things that like to eat them.

Jessie is really doing well this year. She is taking a very nice pitch for her. I have never insisted that she fly higher than necessary to kill ducks. Since I have learned to turn her loose at the truck rather than close to the pond, she is going higher almost each time.

We flushed when she was turning upwind, and she came sizzling down out of the sky finally grabbing a Mallard about 200 yards from the pond. It took her that long to get down. My aching butt won't allow me to run, so I asked Grace to please run up to where she was to protect her from the three Ravens that were harassing her. Grace, being fleet of foot as well as pretty, was there in good time allowing me to hobble down there at my leisure.

 Photo's by Grace

Yesterday evening when I was bringing Jessie and Peg into the shop for the night, Sue started her defiant screams, still in a low voice, but there none the less. I decided that I would just leave her there rather than start another confrontation. So she got to spend the night ( high 30's ) outside rather than in the warm shop. She was less defiant this morning when I picked every one up to go hunting. I am willing to try anything to avoid a confrontation, and if being a Harris sickle will help then I am for it.

I am still taking the transmitter off Peg's tail for a while, so we fired it up, checking it with the receiver, and I clipped it in the holder, or at least I thought that I did. Its a bit tough because you have to lift the wings, find the little clip and then get it stuffed in the clip. A bit like stuffing a wet noodle in a cats butt. You can do it, but it isn't always easy. 

It didn't take too long and the girls started a Bunny that ran into a crack. I flushed him out with my perch and Sue caught him in about 20 feet. It was a bit of an awkward catch with one leg on one side of a Sage main stem and the other one on the other side. She solidified it by grabbing him in the face with her beak and moving the other foot over. I was taking pictures because of the weird position she was in and to my surprise, he broke loose and actually made his getaway. 

 Oh well, if he can do it, more power to him. We hunted on through the rest of the field and it became apparent that the Bunnies were getting precedence, which bother me quite a bit. Sue was watching the Jacks hop off, while Peg was still giving them equal time. I decided to box them up and go to another field to see if the behavior would change.  Before we could get to the truck, Sue caught another one.

We tried two more spots, one had new spooky cows in it so we didn't stay. Sue still wasn't much interested in catching Jacks, so we decided to call it a day. We fed the girls a reduced ration to bring their weight down and put Peg in her box. I reached in to get the transmitter and found that it was not in its clip. Wonderful!

We back tracked with the receiver and finally got a faint signal where I thought it had to be at the first pole that they landed on. We walked all the way to the furthermost point that we had gone and finally found it sticking in a Sage bush there. Tami got a lesson of tracking a transmitter without it being on a bird.

When I got home, I made a few calls and I am going to have to drain the hot tub and take the pump in. We are going to go sit in it a while before I do that this evening.