Music, Chickens, Hawgs

Jack was on a Yahoo group for chicken lovers and posted these entries for that group:

Something got one of the guineas out of the treetops last night, nothing left but a pile of feathers. At twilight [dawn] I went out to the chicken house and smelled a skunk, came in and got a shotgun and the spotlight, found it out under where the guineas sleep in the trees, shot it but the guinea feathers were off west of there some distance. I don’t think it was a skunk got him. I was walking around when it got light enough to see and about 12-15 grown big hawgs crossed west to east in the clearing between here and the Honig fence line. I’d been hearing them but rejecting what my ears were telling me.

For some reason the skunk had dug a lot in the garden area but didn’t dig under the chicken house wall.

I gotta get music going. No ifs buts nor maybes.
Jack

March 15

My old amplifier went out for a couple of weeks and it was silent around here for the first time in 18 months or so, though for the first year it was only Gregorian chants and Carlos Nakai flute, which didn’t seem to have a universal repellent side for predators.

But within a few days after the amp died nature descended like locusts around here. The deer started to think the nighttime chicken pen was a good source of grain, an owl or something else picked off a guinea out of the trees and a skunk arrived to try out the surroundings for regular visits. Coyotes were all directions and close enough so’s we’d consult in pre-dawn howls and yips about whether I was going to put up with them.

Even though the neighboring ranch has hired professional animal killers to come out by helicopter a couple of times and shoot up the hogs and other predators they could see, the injured ones making their way to die in the grader-ditches, a good many of them, yesterday or day before I saw the biggest herd of wild hawgs I’ve ever seen, a dozen or 15, all full grown, crossing the clearing 100 yards to the north. I prioritized getting the music rolling again. Come dawn I’ll see if it made a difference.

Yesterday night or the night before when I killed that skunk, even though I asked myself three distinct times and looked more closely before I fired, whether that could be my old cat Hydrox and clearly saw it wasn’t, once I’d fired I immediately convinced myself it was him I’d shot and didn’t have whatever it takes to go look until I saw him sometime after daybreak.

I’ve never been weak on the insanity ration, but I think it might be getting worse.

Jack