Category Archives: Free-ranging-chickens

Wake-up Call – Coon in the Living Room

Sheeze.  I was lying in there meditating, preparing my spirit for the coming day when I heard a rustling in the other room.  I ignored it at first, figuring it was just one of the cats took advantage of the window screen that doesn’t latch convincingly.  But gradually I focused because somebody was having a party in there.

As I considered the awakening possibilities an opinion formed that it was probably Tabby as the most likely candidate, her being the youngest and most imaginative.  Now, completely focused I listened for more hints until the sound of something falling nudged my curiosity enough to pull me out from under the blanket.

When I came through the door I couldn’t see any cat, but the window screen was pulled open far enough to admit a large cat.  No sign of the offender still, though as I walked over for a closer look.

Then out from under the layers of books and other belongings a large coon face glared at me, hissed and threatened.  I didn’t like this a bit.  There was an escape route through the window, but I was near enough the way out Brother Coon mightn’t consider it the best option.  I didn’t want him coming further into this maze of hiding places.  This cabin isn’t big enough for me and a coon.

I stepped slightly away from the route through the window, eyes locked to his, baring my teeth, growling and snarling, him baring his, then stood stock still.  Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef in the final scene of the Good Bad Ugly.  It seemed to last forever.

But while the tension never eased, like Tuco, I saw his eyes working toward that route outdoors.   My arms were spread to increase my threatening appearance and my hand was near an open bag of pinto beans.  I allowed my hand to creep toward it, then drew and fired a handful of pintos at the coon.

He didn’t have the strength of his convictions.  No Lee Van Cleef, old Brother Coon.  He was out that window faster than I can type it.  I probably should add, I’m having a bit of difficulty typing.  My hands are still shaking a bit.  Clint Eastwood, I ain’t. 

————————————–

Ms Cholla, I feel obliged to update you, wasn’t there for headcount again last night.  This time I was more canny, looked right away over at the rooster compound and there she was, searching and poking around for a way in.  No problem for me.  If she wants to live with the damned roosters it suits me just fine.

————————————————

Spent most of the day yesterday trying to get the Documents and Settings saved from this going-kerplunk comp into some sort of form to allow it all to be transferred to the Thrift Store comp, but no joy.   Kept getting error messages after a few hours at a time of the old machine considering the matter.

Just saying.

Old Jules

5:30 am – That coon’s been back on the porch three times since the post.  He’s standing on his hind legs trying to look in the window or playing with the edge of the door trying to get back in.  But thus far, he’s just a smidgen too canny to give me a shot at him through the window screen. 

He needs to figure out something else to do with his time if he wants to live until daybreak.

Unrequited Requiem for a Chicken

She was always crosswise to the world, even when she was just a pullet, just beginning to free range.  That’s her going back into the night fortress.  It wasn’t more than a week after this picture was taken the guineas decided to sleep in the trees and she decided to join them.

Every night I’d have to turn a water  hose on her and drive her around up there until she gave up and reluctantly came down to join the others out of harm’s way.  As she matured she always reminded me of a woman I used to spend some time with in Socorro, New Mexico, called herself a Cholla.  A consistent pain, pleasing to the eye but always in the wrong place, always ready with a dagger.

Yeah, this chicken sorely tried my patience in every way a chicken could from adolescence to full maturity.

So last night when she wasn’t there for the headcount I assumed she was pulling her favorite evening trick, waiting until all the others were locked down for the night, then coming in panic-stricken, pacing and fussing in mock terror until I re-opened the fortress to let her in.  But she never showed up and I was secretly glad.  I searched around with a flashlight after dark for a while, thinking she might have gone broody outside, or decided to roost on a treelimb. 

Ha!  Nowhere to be found!  Ha!  Coyotes have been calling in close nights lately, so I figured between coyotes and coons that lady was going to pay the price of freedom.

This morning before daybreak I put together a post entitled, Requiem for a Chicken.  Said some nice things about her, partial, selective truths.  Then, in the false dawn I went out and released the main flock, did another headcount as they emerged, just to make sure.

Next I went to the old fortress and cage where I keep the other two roosters separately penned.  Out they came, and there she was.  I don’t have a clue how she got in there.

Always in the wrong place.

Old Jules

Bat in the bug light and other big news and events

Evidently a bat got confused and got snagged in the buglight instead of coming into the cabin to fly around as they usually do.

Every m0rning the chickens feast under that light as soon as I turn them loose.  But I think I’d best unplug it before I poke around with a stick trying to get that bat out of there.

Ah well.  Maybe the chickens will eat it.

This cool morning had me putting on clothing instead of running around with nothing but shoes on to turn out the chickens and feed the cats.  But it reminded me I’ve been almost a year without any gas for the cookstove and no way except the woodstove to knock the morning chill out of the cabin.  I’m going to have to do something about that.

Then there’s this:

It’s coming nigh onto time to haul water again.  Probably also ought to try to figure out what’s wrong with that well pump.  It’s been since last December it quit, but I didn’t want to rush anything.  If I need to pull that pump I didn’t want to do it in cold weather when it happened, but didn’t want to do it in hot weather the rest of the time.

Saw this in the parking lot of the Humane Society Thrift Store the other dayInside the guy was easy to identify, looked about like you'd figure

 

He was poking around in a box of old LP records.  I tried to start a conversation with him about old music but he wasn’t having any of it.

This old XP’s going kerplunk.  I picked up a replacement at the Thrift Store and if I can figure out where all these wires go I’ll have it in here in a jiffy as soon as I get around to it.

Great day to you.

Old Jules

October Quietude, Dead Bugs and Old Roosters

The rains during the past couple of weeks combined with the break in the heat wave hasn’t bumped the Great Speckled Bird back into what must have been a spry, active youth as I’d hoped it might.  [The Great Speckled Bird: Respecting our Betters] [The Liar: The Great Speckled Bird, Part 2

From the inside of Night Fortress 2 there’s a step up through the exit hole and he’s having a lot of difficulty with it because of his crippled leg and wing.

Those chains, incidently, are part of an ongoing war with generations of Brother Coon trying to dig into the fortress at night.  The links where they meet the ground have treble-hooks wired to them to discourage digging there, but it’s a labor intensive game.  They’re the first line of defense.  Under the wood chips they’re on the holes are stuffed with prickly pear cactus, then covered with wood chips.  Brother Coon eventually gets past them all and insists on my going to the next level of debate:  The Lost Coon Diggings

Even the largest hen doesn’t have a problem with it.  But after the hens are all out harvesting the night carcasses under the bug-light he’ll still be in there crowing, evidently dreading the prospect of fighting his way through that opening.

I load the chicken drinking water up with home-made colloidal silver, catch him and soak his legs in orange-peel tincture, and it all seems to help, but gradually GSB’s hard living before I got him’s coming home to roost.

Usually GSB doesn’t indulge in cliche, but maybe his mind’s going, too.  Lately I’ve heard him say more than once, “If I’d known I was going to live this long I’d have taken better care of myself.”

If he keeps doing that I might be tempted to chop off his head.

C. W. McCall “Wolf Creek Pass”

http://youtu.be/xC_onLPc-0E

September 13, moonbows and canned thunder

Expect an uneventful day, blogsters.  Nothing has happened in the world on September 13, since 1922:

Turkey
1922 Turkey Constantinople

13th Sept. 1922 : Following the Turkish Victory in Constantinople, crowds have taken to the streets and are attacking Greek churches and homes and destroying them . The Turkish troops have been dispatched to keep order. The spread of Typhus and the Plague are now reaching epidemic proportions but authorities are insisting they do no not wish aid in the form of medical assistance from neighboring countries.

Siege of Constantinople Public Domain Photo

Full Size Original Here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Siege_of_Constantinople.jpg    Well.

Actually there was this: U.S.
1926 U.S.A. Bandits Robbing Mail Trains

13th September 1926 : The Post Office Department sent a memo to it’s army of 25,000 railway mail clerks an order to shoot to kill any bandits attempting to rob the mail, this follows an ever increasing number of robberies by bandits on the mail service which carries millions of dollars worth of mail every day. They also issued a statement saying that if the robberies continue the marines will be bought in again to protect the mail. http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/september13th.html

But otherwise nothing’s ever happened on September 13, since 1922, so relax.

On the other hand, this from Spaceweather.com

HARVEST MOONBOW: Last night’s Harvest Moon was so bright, it did something normally reserved for the sun. It made a rainbow:

“I was surprised to see a rainbow at night,” says Marsha Adams of Sedona, Arizona, who took the picture nearly 2 hours before sunrise. “The rainbow was apparently caused by the Harvest Moon beaming through the rain clouds.”

Indeed, moonlight reflected by raindrops breaks into the colors of a rainbow just like sunlight does. It takes an especially bright Moon, however, to make the phenomenon visible to the human eye. Did anyone else spot a Harvest Moonbow? Submit your images here.

http://spaceweather.com/

Yeah, Old Sol’s still got a case of measles or chicken pox.  Astrophysicists are attempting to arrive at a consensus about which, without success:

http://spaceweather.com/

I’ve been talking this over with the cats and chickens this morning, the September 13 ennui, and the possible implications and ramifications as they apply to the human psyche and potential injecting something to mitigate it all.  Eventually we agreed on a course of action.

Today I’m going to be playing a constantly repeating CD of a violent thunderstorm outdoors with as much volume as I can coax out of the receiver and speakers.  We here in the middle of nowhere want to do our small part for humanity while maybe giving a whispering hint to Mama Nature without being pushy.

It’s a true fact I’ve observed whenever I’ve been around watching people watch television:  When the box shoots out canned laughter it triggers laughter on the people watching it.  It’s time, the cats, the chickens and I have decided, to give Mama Nature a healthy dose of canned thunder and the sound of rain falling.

Old Jules

9:30 AM – Raising the ante:

On the off-chance I’m being too subtle in my communications with Mama Nature, I’ve got a load of socks and underwear in my handy-dandy 1947 Kenmore washing machine [ Clean Underwear and Hard Times ] running the gauntlet.  After the rinse I’m not going to wring them out, but instead will hang them from the line to provide the nearest thing I’m able to rainfall hitting the dirt underneath the line.

I’m betting between the canned thunder, the sound of rainfall, and all that dripping underneath, Mama Nature’s plenty smart enough to put it all together.

I just hope I got all the soap out of my socks and drawers.  I don’t need Mama Nature soaping down the countryside and trying to wash all the stuff out of the holes in the roof I’ve been plugging to stop the leaks if it ever rains.

Lying Consistently or Telling the Truth

When I got out of the US Army in 1964 I was a confused young man.  I had no idea what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, but initially I felt some urgency to get started doing it.  My first thought was to buy a farm in the vicinity of Portales, New Mexico, where I’d spent most of my youth and done a lot of farm labor.  That area was in the process of the subtle change from hardscrabble family farms to agribusiness farms, though I didn’t recognize it.

Although my granddad had a small farm a few miles from town, and although the main revenue for the population was farm-related, most non-farmers didn’t hold  farmers in high regard.  Including my granddad, with reasons he considered adequate.

The result was that my granddad, my mom and my step-dad took active measures, once I found a 160 acre irrigated farm I could swing for, to make certain with the local bank that I didn’t get financing to buy it.  They each pronounced separately to me that I was destined for ‘better things’ than farming, which I bitterly resented.

Someone mentioned to me the Peace Corps was a place where young people at loose ends were volunteering to go off and set the world right.  Relatively new at the time, I’d never heard of it, but I applied.

Then, as I’d done numerous times before, I hitch-hiked out of that town.  The World Fair was going on in New York, and I headed that direction, and spent the summer in Greenwich Village simulating being a beatnik.

I might talk more about all this in future posts, but I’ve digressed from my original intentions for this one.

I began my Peace Corps training in Hilo, Hawaii.  India X Peace Corps Project, intended to send bright young Americans off to Gujarat, India, to teach the locals how to raise chickens.  Sometime I’ll probably wax poetic about all that, but I’m trying to limit my digressions.

Training was intended to be a time of intense learning, but it was also clear, we were cautioned from the beginning, it also served as a filter to remove the great percentage of the trainees  through observation, psychological testing, peer ratings, and voluntary withdrawals.  A sort of basic training with the emphasis on washing out all trainees with potential shortcomings.  About 2/3 of India X washed out of training before the end, including me.

But I’m having a lot of trouble getting to the point of this post because of all the background material.  Enough!

One of the methods of screening trainees was the Minnesota Multi-Phase Personality Test.  Most of the trainees were well-enough educated to be familiar with it.  The MMPP was reputed to be ‘unbeatable’, and we were each acutely aware of our personal shortcomings.  Most of us agreed if the Peace Corps had any idea what was going on in our heads they’d faint, revive themselves, and deselect us without further ado.

During the week prior to the test we’d gather at night to discuss the best strategy for foiling the Peace Corps cadre and the MMPP.  The two obvious approaches were, a] Tell the truth and suffer the consequences, and hope to be forgiven, or, b] Lie consistently.

By reputation, the MMPP wasn’t capable of being lied to consistently without catching you out.

Most of us viewed ourselves as the cream of US youth.  The Peace Corps told us that’s what we were from the first day of acceptance for training.  We’d been picked from hundreds, maybe thousands of applicants.

So we’d already fooled them that much.

Our consensus as a group was to lie consistently.  Some of us succeeded.

This is getting lengthy, so I’ll use it as a launchpad, most likely, for some future posts.

John Prine– Let’s Talk Dirty in Hawaiian
http://youtu.be/r_vTY67Wd9I

The Liar: The Great Speckled Bird, Part 2

I’ve described a few of the attributes of the GSB on another entry, http://tinyurl.com/4yxat2b,  but I didn’t get around to mentioning another  facet of his complex character traits.  He’s a liar.

When he finds food he’ll burble in a special way for the hens, he won’t eat, but pecks it, lifts it with his beak and drops it, bringing the hens running from all directions to fight over whatever it is.

But sometimes GSB gets lonely when he hasn’t found any food.  He’s crippled up and has to move about with a crow-hop, so chasing hens down when he’s lonely doesn’t come easy the way it does for other roosters.

GSB’s developed a practical solution to the problem.  He lies.

When things get slow and GSB wants companionship he’ll pick a spot where he might have found food if there’d been some there, and he’ll burble, scratch and peck, picking up imaginary food and dropping it.  The hens are wise to this tactic.  Somehow they’re able to sense he’s faking it, so they keep on with whatever they’re doing.

But GSB knows hens.  Keeps right on, insisting he’s actually got something they’d like.  Gets excited, urgent in his pronouncements about what he’s offering.  Eventually, one or another of the hens will begin to meander toward him, curiosity overcoming the weight of her experience and common sense.  Usually when one hen heads toward him the others can’t stand the thought she might get something they’ll miss, so the momentum increases and becomes a race to see who’ll get to him first.

When a hen reaches him GSB lifts the imaginary morsel one more time, burbles, and mounts her for a quickie.  The other hens lose interest, GSB dismounts and wanders away, and the hen stays squatted on the spot a couple of minutes on the chance he’ll come back for more.

But if it’s to be done, best it were done quickly.

Old Jules

The Taker – Kris Kristofferson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bfkN2i-yS04

He’s a giver, he’ll give her
The kind of attention that she’s never known
He’s a helper, he’ll help her
To open the doors that she can’t on her own
He’s a lover, he’ll love her
In ways that she never has been loved before
And he’s a getter, he’ll get her
By gettin her into the world she’s been hungerin’ for

’cause he’s a taker, he’ll take her
To places and make her fly higher than she’s ever dared to
He’ll take his time before takin’ advantage
Takin’ her easy and slow
And after he’s taken the body and soul
That she gives him, he’ll take her for granted
Then he’ll take off and leave her
Takin’ all of her pride as he goes

He’s a charmer, and he’ll charm her
With money and manners that I never learned
He’s a leader, and he’ll lead her
Across pretty bridges he’s planning to burn
He’s a talker, he’ll talk her
Right off of her feet, but he won’t talk for long
Cause he’s a doer, and he’ll do her
The way that I never
And damned if he won’t do her wrong
’cause he’s a taker, he’ll take her
To places and make her fly higher than she’s ever dared to
He’ll take his time before takin’ advantage
Takin’ her easy and slow
And after he’s taken the body and soul
That she gives him, he’ll take her for granted
Then he’ll take off and leave her
Takin’ all of her pride as he goes

The Great Speckled Bird: Respecting our Betters

We humans cross paths with nobility so rarely, the surprise is in the fact we recognize there’s something akin to reality behind the concept.  Instead of looking for it we make heroes of celebrities, preachers, soldiers, cops, politicians, popular science personalities and any gender capable of making our genitals tingle.

We need heroes too badly to hold out for anything worthy of admiration in our fellow humans.  Far better to have a fat, power-drunken political radio rhetorician, an angry, strutting songster shouting a drumbeat of communal self-pity,  a tribe of pierced, tattoo–branded cattle, anyone who can catch a football  to represent the best we can find as objects of our veneration,  than to have nothing at all.

But I’ve digressed.

Probably Christendom runs amok with people who share their lives with creatures they believe are noble, worthy of a higher level of respect than the fantasy masturbation indulged in when they consider their favorite preacher, guru, rock star, or pleasing features.  A cat, a horse, a dog– anything capable of out-doing a human being when it comes to loyalty and the ability to do well what nature gave it the means of doing.  Most settle for less, knowing it doesn’t require perfection to trump any competition the human species is likely to put forward.

I’ve known a good many cats, and share my life with some now I’d stack up against the great majority of humans I’ve met in 6.8 decades of life.  They were good, each in ways we measure felines.

But the Great Speckled Bird is in a class all his own.

He was given to me as a discard, a crippled leg, a wing that hung low from some past injury.  I took him, but I wasn’t glad.  Not until a few days later when I saw him trying to convince a hen that a particular spot was okay for laying eggs.  Not until he snuggled himself into the spot while she looked on, hen-like.  Not until he stood guard at the entry while she did her business.

That was my first hint there was something special going on here.  I’ve admired roosters for conspicuous courage, smiled at their pride and posturing, cursed their wrong-headedness, acknowledged over time that traits of average roosters bear a lot of similarity to those of human heroes, celebrities, and the common run of mankind, only the roosters are more consistent, better at  it.

Learning to respect the Great Speckled Bird required me to suspend disbelief.  I had to learn to believe my eyes and forget the expectations acquired by long acquaintance with roosters.

Over time I watched him deprive himself as a matter of ritual, calling the hens to any food he found, picking it up showing it to them, dropping the morsel for them to fight over.  Refusing to go into the chicken-house at night until all the hens were safely inside.  A few months after his arrival I’d lost seven hens to some predator within a couple of days.  I was indoors when I heard the cacophony of flock alarm somewhere out back, took up a long gun and hurried to see what was wrong.  The Great Speckled Bird took flank position and we trekked in the direction of loose feathers up the hill.  I knew I’d lost another chicken, but I saw no sign of what got her.

Suddenly TGSB spread his wings and made a run for a cedar about 40 yards away.  When he was a few yards away a fox darted from beneath, crosswise to both our paths.  I fired and the fox chose to visit the place where chickens don’t have roosters and men with guns to guard them, or whatever place fox-folk think they go when they die.

Last winter was a tough one for the Great Speckled Bird.  Younger roosters were maturing and a long cold spell weakened him enough so the beta birds discovered they could beat him out in a fight.  I caged them so they couldn’t follow through, and he recovered.

But I’ve just pulled a brooding hen off nine eggs she sat for 25 days, none of them fertile.  The winter must have done more damage than his frost-bitten comb and the beatings from the other roosters.  No more chicks around here until he’s gone, but I doubt he’ll make it through another winter.

One morning I’ll go out there, see him lying beneath the roosting hens and whisper, the king is dead.  Long live the king.

Old Jules