Cats!

Posts from the previous two weeks were about HVAC. The Neilson ratings have come in and I’m concerned I may have permanently torpedoed our business. As an attempt to drive up viewership, today’s post will be about cats. There will be pictures. Cat pictures.

Snowy Brook Farm believes firmly in the Three Cat Doctrine. This principle states that the household can and must support three cats at all times to maintain an appropriate balance of mice carcass, carpet hairball stains, and nighttime wailing. Fewer than three cats and you risk not having enough throwaway photos for the annual Christmas card. More than three cats, and Amy gets put in charge of scooping poop. And so, the Three Cat Doctrine has been maintained at Snowy Brook, as well as our previous enterprises, for nearly a decade. With that out of the way, allow me to introduce to you to the three current cats of Snowy Brook Farm, in order of most to least obese (this also happens to be chronological. No correlation I’m sure).

Name: Pudge
Age: Old
Weight: A Lot

This is Pudge. I considered going with a picture that showed his face, but frankly, that’s not what Pudge is about. Pudge has one trick. That trick is belly rubs. There’s absolutely nothing else to this thing. In fact, let’s go through the 7 characteristics that define life and see if Pudge even qualifies.

  • Cellular Organization: Pudge is a unicellular organism composed of a single fat cell. Passes, but barely
  • Homeostasis: Should Pudge’s external environment change, he is unable to stay composed internally. Hard fail.
  • Metabolism: Pudge is able to convert food to poop. Pass
  • Growth: Pudge grows exponentially with time. Pass
  • Adaptation: Changing the cat food from pate to chunky took a few days for him to understand that both were a form of food, but he eventually figured it out. Pass
  • Response to stimuli: Touch Pudge, he flops. Sunbeam? Flop. Pile of clothes? Flop. A single response regardless of the form the stimuli takes. Pass, but only with like a C-
  • Capable of Reproducing: Nope

So there you have it. As far as life goes, Pudge probably falls more in that hazy virus category rather than a fully complex organism. We enjoy his presence nonetheless, but overall, he ranks 3rd on the cat tier list.

Name: Bird
Age: Increasing
Weight: Increasing

This is Bird. Her name is actually an Always Sunny reference, but everyone just assumes her name is Bird because we own 600 of them, and that fine. Bird follows the “scaredy cat” archetype. If you visit, you will never meet Bird, for every sound you make sounds to Bird like an attempt on her life. Despite this, she is adaptive to her surroundings and is the only cat that has shown a shred of intelligence in this household. Additionally, she is the only cat that does not scream at 3am. For this reason, Bird currently has the distinction of Best Cat.

Name: Pea (formerly known as Peacock)
Age: Also Increasing
Weight: Surprisingly healthy!

Pea is the newest member of the household, having been here approximately a year. Amy rescued him as a stray following a hit-and-run, nursed him back to health, and ever since he has loathed her for it and taken to me instead, who gives him very good pets. Suggested names originally included Roadkill, One Eyeball (he originally only had one working eye from the accident), and TongueStickyOutey. Ultimately we settled on Peacock due to his incessant screaming reminiscent of a bird in heat. Since then, he has been neutered, and so we dropped the cock and just call him Pea. Pea is a normal cat. Pea hunts. Pea screams. Pea sees fragile items and knocks them over. Though originally more aloof, Pea has been learning the ways of the flop from Pudge and is slowly transitioning from “wild feral” to “fat flopping cat”. His fear of pate is the only thing keeping him at a stable weight.

So those are our cats. But like any good sitcom, it’s the supporting roles that truly elevate the cast. Here are some of the supporting cats in our lives.

Poopsie is the queen. Dropped off on the side of the road as the runt some 10 years ago and found by Amy and her siblings, Poopsie took her runt status with prejudice and through hard work, became The Greatest Cat. Friendly, curious, regal, lethal, all while possessing the dumbest face, Poopsie combines all the best qualities of cats and shows that microevolution is possible in mammals. She is the mother of Pudge and many other popular kittens, and currently resides in Northeastern Pennsylvania where she can keep a close watch on Amy’s family.

This is CatSpar, the neighbor’s cat. Do not be fooled by his adorable looks and extremely pettable head, for CatSpar has a single purpose in life: To destroy the Snowy Brook cats and void the Three Cat Doctrine.  While upon first glance he may come across as a major antagonist to the Snowy Brook trio, there have been surprisingly fewer coyote attacks since he began making his presence known. Perhaps CatSpar is less of a villain and more of an antihero. Either way, very cute.

We’ve got (top-right) Plume, (bottom-left) Egg, (bottom-right) Marshmellow, and (top-left) We Paid $300 to Have You Neutered 2 Days Ago And Now You Decide to Die? These four cats were all once members of the Three Cat Doctrine at Snowy Brook Farm, but have moved on to other things for various, dead-related reasons. They were all good bois, and it is believed that in moments of dire stress, the current Snowy Brook trio calls upon the spirits of these past lives to help guide them, be it in discovering some sort of new yowl, finding new crevices to flee from scary guests, or learning to poop right on the edge of the litter box for maximum mess.

Alright, you got your animal pictures. Next week we’ll talk desuperheaters! No? More animal stories? Fine.

 

The Inevitable Heat Pump Post (Part 2)

 

-It was snowing
-There were some math equations
-These farmers have a whiteboard in their dining room?
-Heat pumps are a good way to save substantial money on heating costs and make the planet less sad

 

And now for the thrilling conclusion!

 

Up to this point, the heat pumps I have referred to are all “air-source” heat pumps. They extract heat from the air and move it into your home. Now there’s two issues with this when you’re a farm on the highest point in Erie County, NY, downwind of a Great Lake.

  1. There are days during the winter where extracting heat from the outdoor air becomes a bit difficult, as the outdoor air is -10F.
  2. These systems, just like a central air conditioner, require the compressor to be located outside 

Okay, maybe a heat pump isn’t ideal for this location.

But this is where “ground source” heat pumps come into play. Instead of transferring heat from the outside air, these units instead use heat from water in pipes buried underground, which run into a compressor in the basement. When the heat is extracted, the water cools, but as it circulates through the underground pipe, the ground recharges its temperature, serving as a method of creating a near-perpetual heat source. This type of system is typically referred to as “geothermal” systems because it’s a much cooler term to market, but in reality it’s just another type of heat pump, using water instead of air.

So how much underground pipe does it take to maintain a consistent loopfield temperature throughout the year?

Answer: A lot. For us, it was 5400 feet of slinky pipe buried 8 feet below the ground. All this to achieve a water temperature that varies from 32F in the winter to 60F in the summer. 

But did it work?

Like any completely normal human being, for the last 3 years I had been tracking our daily heating usage, originally with the propane furnace and later on with the heat pump. Here is a plot of the daily cost of heating our house in 2021 was using propane ($2.50 a gallon) versus the heat pump in 2023 ($0.10 per kWh)

Totally normal, human thing to do! Anyways, the end result is that our annual heating bill is $500 instead of $2500, and I don’t spend every evening in the basement sniffing the tiny leaks in our gas line and squirting the joints with soapy water, like normal people totally do. It also produces free hot water in the winter, which will be discussed in Heat Pumps Part 3  is neat!

So that’s it. That’s my tale on heat pumps. But is a heat pump right for you? In almost all situations, an air-source heat pump is a decent investment so long as you’re not currently using cheap natural gas, and you don’t live in New England or California where your electric prices are $0.30/kWh. In a few special circumstances where rebates are available and expert installers are prevalent, a ground source heat pump may even make financial sense. So if you think your situation is right for a heat pump, talk to your local HVAC contractor today and tell them Zach sent you! They won’t know what the hell you’re talking about.

You folks have been robbed of animal pictures for 2 weeks now. I will rectify that next week

The Inevitable Heat Pump Post (Part 1)

Hello again everyone!

Just a reminder that if you’re interested in posts that do not have math in them, please visit the Snowy Brook Facebook page for relevant, interesting farm stories, and not the ramblings of a middle-aged farmhand.

With that out of the way… since it’s snowing today, I think we’ll make today’s topic about HVAC! Buckle up folks

Northern Country Livin’ ™ has its advantages. Cheap land. Serene snowfalls. Waking up an hour before sunrise because your chickens want the world to know that they are both alive and sexually active. But one thing that’s not great about Northern Country Livin’ ™ is the heating bill. Rural areas don’t have access to cheap natural gas, and many homes around here are reliant on heating with propane (or worse, heating oil). At $2.50 for a gallon of propane, you’re looking at $2000+ a winter to heat a typical Buffalonian home to a reasonable temperature (my parents would make it clear that the 63F we heat it to here is NOT reasonable). But folks, it’s 2024. Technology has improved! That’s why we kicked our propane furnace to the curb and got a heat pump installed instead. WARNING! Math is coming

Yes, a heat pump! It’s exactly like an air conditioner, but with a reversing valve that lets it also heat in the winter. For decades, these devices weren’t really an option in northern climates. They work by extracting heat from the air outside and moving it into your home. In Buffalo, heat can be hard to find in the outdoor air in winter. But in the last decade, technology has vastly improved, and heat pumps can now work efficiently even in our climate. How efficiently? Math time!

Electrical resistance heating produces 3,412 Btus of heat per every kWh of electric consumed. In a climate like Buffalo, a typical modern air-source heat pump will run with a seasonally-averaged efficiency of ~3 (COP=3) times more efficient than electrical resistance heating over the course of a winter.

1 kWh of heat pump = 3,412 x 3 =  10236 Btus of heat

The cost of electric where we are is $0.138 per kWh.

So the cost to create one thousand Btus of heat with a heat pump is $0.138/10.236 = $0.0134

Let’s put that nifty result on the whiteboard and store it for later

(Yes, Snowy Brook Farm has a whiteboard. Yes, there does appear to be a list of favorite foods on the left. Yes a story on why we have a massive whiteboard and the top 10 food list would be much more interesting than unit conversion post. In due time, friends. In due time…)

Alright, let’s do the same for propane!

1 gallon of propane burned in a 95% efficient furnace = 87,000 Btus of heat

The cost of propane where we are is $2.50 per gallon.

So the cost to create one thousand Btus of heat with a propane furnace is $2.50/87 =$0.0287

Let’s add that nifty result to the whiteboard

There you have it! $0.0134 <<<< $0.0287. At current utility prices here, switching from propane to a heat pump will more than halve your heating bill. And so that’s exactly what Snowy Brook Farm did! Well, sort of…

Tune in next week for the thrilling conclusion of The Inevitable Heat Pump Post! If you enjoy trenches, digging trenches, or looking at trenches dug by someone else, you won’t want to miss this!

My Favorite Farm photo

Hello again everyone!

I bet you all thought you were getting one update and that was it for the next three years. Well let me assure you I plan to at least do 3-4 updates before forgetting about this page, so ha!

Today’s update is an easy one. While I could post pictures of all the new chicks that hatched yesterday all bundled together with their big beady eyes and photogenic beaks, that content is already readily available on the official Snowy Brook Facebook account. To keep the website feeling like a fresh experience, I will try to create exclusive content that has a more Zachesque flair to it, while constantly pointing you, the reader, to the Snowy Brook Farm Facebook account for actual, high-quality farm content.

Instead of cute chicks, I present you with my favorite farm photo in the 4 years we’ve been doing this shindig. BEHOLD

What makes this photo so good? Is it perfectly circular eye, fully exposed, with an equally perfectly circular black bead in the middle? Could it be the beak, which has the faintest hint of a smile but also the sinister goose teeth sticking through the gaps? Perhaps it’s the feather fluff, which starts out perfectly groomed at the bottom, but gets increasingly erratic as you get to the upper neck. Or perhaps it’s just because the pose reminds me of this Chocobo from my childhood.

Whatever it is, I think we can all agree that the goose photo is without question one of the greatest photos of the modern HD era. If you plan on using it for a photo contest, I only request a credit in the acknowledgements, and a 70% royalty fee.

 

Zach is taking over Life in the Coop!

Hello all!

Amy is clearly very busy running the actual business. Fortunately, Zach the farmhand has managed to guess the password to the website (it was chicken) and will be taking over this blogging series so that you can participate vicariously in all of our crazy adventures! (note: you can catch up on our adventures through Facebook too but in a more eloquent, controlled, business-friendly prose if that’s more your style)

So what’s changed since… Mud Season of 2021? Well… the Eagles almost won a Superbowl, Square Enix finally made a good video game, and most importantly, we have more avian animals than ever before! The biggest change since 2021 has been the addition of ducks. Many ducks. 50ish. Now some may wonder what one does with 50 ducks. We’re still working on figuring that part out. But in the meantime, we’ve built them a pond! The pond is situated just outside my office window, so naturally morale is at an all-time high and productivity is at an all-time low.

Lots of other things to update you (i.e. probably my parents) with, but we’ll make this a slow drip to keep the content rolling over the next few weeks and take in all that delicious ad revenue. Note to self… find ad sponsors for website.

Happy Monday! It’s almost spring

It’s Mud Season 4/8/21

The weather finally appears to be looking up. Even on the cold days, the sun shines warm. It’s starting to feel like we’re no longer in Washington state and more like we’re in the Northeast. The winters here are long, but the promise of spring is worth it.. All except for the fact that we have to go through mud season first. 

 

Mud season is one of my least favorite seasons, right up there with mid-February, where the wind blows so fiercely and the air is so cold that it feels like your very breath is being ripped from your chest. While it’s nice to see little blades of grass turning green, buds swelling, and daffodils peeking out from the mulch, every squelching step throws mud onto your boots and our favorite trails to the coops are pock-marked with boot and chicken prints. 

 

Normally, we move our mobile coops around the pasture every week to give the gals access to new grass directly around the pens (they otherwise can explore as far out as they desire), but just driving around with the Ranger causes rutting, so forget pulling a 300-400lb coop. We just have to be patient until the ground dries out. Until then, it’s a battle to keep the entrances to the coop dried out. The hens thankfully are good at keeping themselves clean through preening and hopping over muddy patches. We’re definitely buying our fair share of wood shavings, and every time I drive past a Tractor Supply, another 5 bags get packed into the trunk. The good news is that in another 6 months, we’ll have plentiful volumes of compost!

 

We also have some work that’s waiting on things to dry out. At the end of this month, we expect our order of 100 fruit and nut trees to come in, and we’ll need to use the tractor to move soil to plant the trees on mounds so that we don’t have trees drowning in our high spring water table this time around. We also will need to move a few tons of gravel to make the pad for our new “Home Flock” coop. Our berries also need mulched. Problem is, a 4 ton piece of equipment doesn’t mix well with sogged out ground. Just look at the fun thing I did a couple of weeks back…

Running a tractor through the backyard in early spring was not the smartest idea I’ve ever had. Backdragging this area has been added to the “to do” list for summer.

Unfortunately, time waits on no-one, and the trees and shed will come before the end of the month. We don’t dry out until June. The yard is going to get more of those beautiful ruts… which means that I’ll have alot of backdragging and reseeding work to do. That’s okay though. At least we have the equipment and seed to do it.

 “Just two more months” I keep telling myself. “Just two more months and it will dry out”.

We’re Back!! 3/23/21

Welcome back, everyone! I know this little blog has been on hiatus for the past 5 months, and to those dedicated readers, our most sincere “Thank you!” for hanging in there. Remember in our last post (all the way back in October!!!) where I shared that we were being pulled in 1,000 directions? Well, that didn’t let up. The shorter days and incessant snow, wind, and below freezing temperatures didn’t help matters any, either. It takes us about an hour and a half to plow ourselves out when it snows and cracking ice out of waterers 1-3 times a day and collecting eggs 4 times daily from 7 coops really eats up all the free time. Now, we should be in the free and clear, since night-time temperatures are getting above freezing and day time temperatures are high enough to solidify us into mud season.

Some exciting news! We’ve had some custom egg cartons made and will start selling eggs in the next week or two! Our ladies are laying up a storm. The groups include the breeder flocks and the ready-to-lay pullets. When Z and I collected eggs a few nights back, we counted, and got 10 dozen out of a little under 200 birds… Quite impressive for girls just getting into the swing of things. Everyone but the 13 birds in Home Flock are about 7.5 months old, which means that egg size has started out at a light medium, and has been steadily increasing to a light large. The eggs are simply beautiful. With the free ranging everyone is doing now as well as us offering free choice oyster shells to everyone, shells are shiny and tough. While there is little around in terms of grass, the girls are picking bugs and bits out of the field and leaf litter in the woods. This, in combination with the alfalfa in their feed, makes for strong yellow-orange yolks. The whites stand tall and hold together well.

These egg cartons are made of recycled materials. How awesome is that?!

This week, you’ll see a couple updates to our product inventory. We have some updated pictures of our ready-to-lay pullets as well as updated availability. Additionally, because we are getting more eggs than we can set every two weeks, we will be offering a few of our breeder birds for sale as ready-to-lay pullets. They, like the grow-outs, are around 7.5 months old and will lay steadily through the year before taking a break this coming winter. 

Finally, there will be two changes to the “Chicks” page. I’m going to be removing the estimated hatchling availability table because we have been having some trouble getting our incubators to hold temperature properly and the hatches are not meeting our estimates like we thought they would. Instead, we are going to offer a wait list for each of our hatch dates, and if you are interested, please reach out, let me know which breeds you’re interested in and how many, and I’ll contact you as soon as we have a hatch so that you can select your chicks.

 

The second change is that in addition to our pure breeds, we are going to offer some Home Flock babies for sale. These chicks will come in an assortment of colors, comb styles, and personalities, and will lay eggs that can be blue, green, light brown, and dark brown. We love our menagerie of Home Flock birds, and are looking forward to sharing them with any who want to add a little spice to their purebred flocks. For those who are not familiar with mixed breed hens, they are a delight. No two are exactly the same, and they get to take advantage of hybrid vigor, which means that they will be stronger and will very well likely be better producers than their parents. If you’re not particular about egg or feather color, these will be for you. We’ll also be raising out a few as started pullets and will do our best to put up photos of the individuals available.

Cats on Eggs
Plume and Egg loved laying on the incubators when we were using blankets to regulate their temperatures. However, after having inadvertently raised incubator temperatures, we have discontinued blanket use and crank up the incubator temps under close supervision.

That’s all for tonight! See you next week!

Waste Not, Want Not 10/27/2020

While we won’t spare expense for the welfare and happiness of our birds, we do like to take advantage of a good opportunity now and again. This saga starts with a deck on our sunroom that needed replaced. The 12’x15’ deck was constructed in two different phases by two different owners, and needed to be removed to allow for roof damage repair underneath. Unfortunately, it wasn’t constructed in such a way to allow for disassembly and reassembly, so we requested that the contractors remove it and put it aside for us to dismantle for storage and later use. They agreed, and we got more than we had ever hoped for; not only did the contracting team remove the boards, but they also removed the hardware and separated the boards in piles by size. AH-mazing. 

 

While the plan was to use the boards in the spring to build new mobile coops, We had to use them sooner than we had anticipated. It just so happened that we had a mink or weasel get into one of our grow-out coops by sliding through the poultry net and digging under 2 feet of perimeter mesh. That little devil killed 16 birds in one night, the wasteful, wanton thing. We knew then that our predator proofing solution was not going to work and that we’d have to put floors in the coops. That’s just what we did. Turns out, the deck took care of flooring for three of our mobile coops of 48 sqft, 48sqft, and 63 sqft with only a couple boards to spare.

 

Back in August when we built this, we were sure it was predator proof. How were we to know a mustelid could be so persistent?

New floor going in with supports made from railings of the old deck.

Beautiful pinewood floorboards = safe birds and no more nighttime chicken parent anxiety.

Although we hate to have the birds up off the ground for the fertility aspect in our pasture rotation program, we still allow the birds out in runs during the day to fertilize the earth, and we compost the bedding into a rich, fertile amendment to use in the garden.

 

Speaking of compost, the railings were one of those deck items that I wasn’t sure we’d have a use for. They were only 3.5 feet long and about an inch and a half wide. However, after the attack, it became clear that we needed to build the compost bin system we’d planned for next year asap to compost the mortalities. The evening after the coop floors were in, Amy went out and built the compost bins. We now have three – one for used bedding (to use as carbon for the composting process), one for a primary compost cycle, and one for a secondary compost cycle.

 

Classy and functional new compost bin!

I will say that last week was a whirlwind of essential and timely building projects. In the moment, it’s go-go-go. However, only a few days later, I can reflect happily on how we can breathe new life into old things and how we can save items that were destined for the landfill. 

 

All the chickens are to bed now, and I’m going to sleep well knowing everyone is safe and sound.

 

Until next week!

 

Amy

Chickens Enjoy Tomato Scraps 10/21/20

Chickens like many things. They enjoy birdseed. Corn. Watermelon. Cantaloupe innards. Seedy zucchini. Burnt corn bread muffins. But, when Zach dumped the small bucket of tomato scraps from my canning adventure onto the ground, the excitement was palpable. 

Seeing the chickens go to town on a pile of tomato scraps was a comforting sight in what has been a whirlwind of a month. I’ve been feeling pulled in 1,000 directions lately as the season ends and we get ready for the first snowfall of the season, which, as Zach points out on a near daily basis, is just around the corner. It’s crazy to think of how short our season was this year and how turbulent it’s been in regards to weather. The late, wet spring, dry summer, and early frost made it really hard to determine planting dates and maturity tables for our crops. Our garden got in late, and the slugs had a field day with the warm wet start. Only about ⅓ of our crops made it, which is a pity, but that’s how it goes sometimes.

After some thinking on the uncertainty of Mother Nature, we are going to focus on the fruit side of things for edible products. While the trees and bushes take a longer establishment time than annual vegetables, they are more certain in regards to their production. We found a reputable, quality, local nursery with a large selection of fruit trees and another few reputable nurseries for fruit bushes, vines, and brambles. This year, we planted half of the orchard. A minimum of 5 varieties of fruit have been selected from each tree type, since variety is the spice of life! Stay tuned for the following: apples, pears, Asian pears, peaches, nectarines, apricots, tart cherries, sweet cherries, European plums, Japanese plums, blueberries, gooseberries, currants, red raspberries, and blackberries. It’s alot, but Amy has a love of fruit that just can’t be quenched. Plus, she has experience working with it on her dad’s farm in NEPA and is quite excited for the development of the orchard. We don’t expect to have a wide selection of fruits until about 3-4 years from now, when the trees begin to produce in abundance. 

Next year, we will have a limited farm stand, with strawberries from this year’s planting (If I can keep the deer out of them!!), extra vegetables from our home garden, and eggs. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you the maturity tables, but I’ll be posting updates to our facebook page! https://www.facebook.com/snowybrookfarm Stay happy and healthy everyone!

 

Predators – The Bane of our Existence 9/30/20

Let me say it now before I go any further, “Where there’s stock, there’s trouble”. This quote flitted into my mind just as I drafted this update and I know it’s because I’ve been reading James Herriot before going to sleep. It’s a phrase that has been hanging on the fringes of my mind ever since we got the farm and Zach asked me what livestock we were going to have. I knew I could handle the typical problems with poultry without needing to call a vet, so it gave us yet another reason to start with those. But while I was fine with disease pressures, I had forgotten how constant predator pressure is.

We had our first incident back in early June  when we moved the Home Flock to their first coop. The coop was on some bumpy ground, leaving inch gaps under some of the coop bottom boards. I knew that it wasn’t secure, but I thought, “oh, I’ll fix it tomorrow”. And guess what? A predator got in there, pulled one of our Welsummers out, and had a feast. Based on the aftermath, it was likely a racoon. That next morning, I was kicking myself as we moved the coop to a more secure location and added cement blocks around the perimeter to discourage digging. We also made sure our poultry net stayed closed at all times.

We didn’t lose a bird again until July, just after the ladies began laying and we had moved them into the orchard. I was away for a weekend, and at that time, we weren’t religious about conducting headcounts before putting the birds to bed.

At that time, we had a pet White Rock named “Crooked Toes”. His name came from… you guessed it… His crooked toes. He was also the head honcho, making sure everyone was in the coop before he settled in for the night. The night that I’d left, Zach locked up the birds, went to bed, and that was that. The next morning, he texted to let me know that Crooked Toes was gone. All that was left was a pile of white feathers. After frantic texting, a video call, and pictures of every inch of the coop and every bird, we concluded that not only had Crooked Toes met his end that night, but also one of the breeder Easter Egger males and an adorable runty little Easter Egger hen. After sleuthing, it appeared that those three were left out of the coop by accident (the coop had been closed after the sun had gone down and they weren’t seen). Because the bodies had been carried away, we deemed the culprit was a coyote or a fox. It’s safe to say that after that point, we started doing headcounts every night.

About a month later, Zach and I were sitting in the kitchen after breakfast when I heard frantic screaming coming from a chicken. Well, I heard frantic screaming… Zach was just getting used to chicken noises and that one was new to him. Anyway, I stopped what I was doing, shoved my feet into boots, and ran as hard as I could over to the pen. Unfortunately, all I saw was a pile of feathers and no Brahma Girl (our lone Light Brahma). I also realized that while everyone else was safe inside the poultry fence, her feathers were about 5 feet outside of it. It appeared that she was outside, doing her chicken thing, and was caught blind-sided. Poor lady. 

Following the trail of feathers, I figured whatever took her wouldn’t get far and might drop her because of my quick reaction and chase. The feathers led into the newly dug drainage ditch beside the coops that I had let grow up on the sides because I wasn’t concerned about weed whacking at that point. Bad choice. I found poor Brahma Girl at the bottom of the new ditch where it empties into a horizontal culvert. She was gone, but still very warm. So warm, in fact, that I hung onto her for about an hour to make sure she was really gone. All the signs of death were apparent when I picked her up out of that ditch, but when an animal is more a pet than livestock passes, it’s hard to accept that they are gone. Well, after that hour had passed, in true “waste not, want not” fashion, I processed her and we had chicken soup for dinner. We also moved the birds into the front field, which is more or less in our backyard. There, we figured, we would at least catch predators on camera…

Then came today. 

Circles was a light, warm, gentle soul. He was a Classic Roman goose that had been shipped to us as a blind, runty gosling. While he was supposed to be one of twelve, we only received him and his brother. Needless to say, our idea of starting a small breeding flock of geese for livestock guardians went out the window and both Circles and Goosey became pasture pets. Circles was extra special in that we would hand feed him daily to ensure he got enough feed into him to grow, and we carried him lovingly into and out of his mobile coop to ensure he stayed safe overnight. When you came near, he’d use his bill to search out treats in your hand and nibble your shirt. 

Over the months, we let him have more and more freedom. Because he couldn’t see, he’d simply wander blindly in circles, plop down in a nice soft patch of grass in the sun, and nap. Sometimes, something would frighten him and he’d circle off into the brook on the far side of the field. We kept our eye out for him every hour or so and would bring him back towards the coops when he strayed. 

Today was the same as any other day. Circles was sitting out in the field, enjoying himself. We were in the house working. We had last checked on him earlier that afternoon. Around 4:30, Zach asked me if I’d seen the goose. I hadn’t. He went to check our security cam to see what direction he’d wandered… but he hadn’t wandered this time. In the footage, about an hour prior to us noticing he was missing, a large dog-like animal came out of seemingly nowhere, attacked, and dragged him off. It was horrifying to watch, much like a trainwreck.. My eyes were glued to the screen. What’s worse is that the camera had also recorded the sound of that final struggle. Even now, I can’t get that image and sound out of my head. It’s one thing knowing that an animal was taken, but another thing entirely to watch it happen.

Quickly, Zach thought to use the drone to see if he could find remains. He found them. Just inside the woodline. Along with the predator: a coyote. With his ninja-like reflexes, he snapped a picture before it ran off with the partially eaten body of our dead pet, leaving only the head and a pile of feathers, as I later found when I went out to recover him. Although it sucked to see all that remained, it gave me a sense of closure. The remains of Circles are now in our compost pile, becoming nutrients to feed more life on our farm. The circle of life continues on. 

We never in a million years thought that a coyote would walk into our mowed 10 acre field and snatch Circles, or any bird for that matter, in broad daylight. The only thing I can think of it that this animal was desperate. Otherwise, why would such a shy creature risk himself so close to people to get a meal? I have all of my fingers and toes crossed that this was a one-off sort of thing. But I’ll tell you what… I am watching out the window constantly now. I jump up at any strange sound and make sure everyone is ok. I make sure the doors to the coop are closed a little tighter, and I hold my favorite birds a little closer.

When we farm, we are at the whims of mother nature, and we have to do what we can to protect our stock, while respecting all she throws at us. After every attack, we have learned something. Our system gets better. Our birds become safer. We’ll find a way to maintain balance.