One managed to squeeze into the duck run and attack a duck. Duck’s alive and eating, but legs are all messed up. Hopefully they’ll be back to working soon. Possum took a lot of .22 to the torso and head. It’s good and dead, which is good.
A lazy possum got tired of fighting the cats for their cat food and went after our two free ranging chickens who sleep in a coop with a busted latch. One chicken ran away to live to chicken it up another day. The other did not. The possum received a bite of chicken and two bullets from my husband, probably not quite the meal before a long rest it was hoping for.
So one chicken is alive somewhere in the trees and the other is dead, along with the predator that came after it. We have the darnedest ill luck with poultry in winter.
No pictures, and I think that’s for the best. The sheep are doing all right though. They like the mild winter.
Out of three laying ducks, two were killed by a small predator, as it crawled under our electronet but didn’t knock it over and it went through a very small gap between two cattle panels. And it wasn’t a hungry one, since I found the corpses near the door of the run. Necks broken I guess, very little in the way of bites. Probably something like a possum, but could be mink or weasel. I am not sure, I’m not familiar with predators who leave whole dead ducks lying around. And the bites were small.
Now that my hands have gotten a chance to recover from the cold, I’m going back out and taking some better pictures of the bite marks for my husband to make his guesses when he gets home and after picture-taking, I’ll bury them in the wood chips.
A quote from my lovely husband regarding our homesteading expenses to date. He was speaking of the potential expense in getting a panel of some kind to secure the main gate to our barn, as the barn is set up for horses and the horse gate leaves room for coyotes to easily slink through.
This was his solution. Redneck engineering ftw!
The gate is an abandoned leftover from the old landscaping. It’s secured, we rammed it like a 30lb coyote might if hungry and it held up. Cost=$0.
A closer view. It’ll do.
The stuff outside is the old straw that was in the barn. We tossed it out and it’s been breaking down over the last few months. That pile was 3x as high when we mucked out originally.
As to where the 3k figure came from, that is for another day, whenever I can get the free time for those boring posts about homestead cost accounting. Running numbers is way more time consuming than tossing up a few pictures, even with captions and commentary.
Food, Farming and Faith in Snohomish County 