Another of my six-week-old chickens was killed in the early hours of this morning. The noise the chickens were making awakened my dad, who ran downstairs to check on them. He found a dead chick. It had been killed by a wound to the neck, just like the chick on Tuesday.
For breakfast, my mom made Flour City emmer orzo that she'd got at the Lexington Food Co-op last night. My dad and I ate ours with peach (Thorpes), while my mom had hers with frozen blueberries (frozen from a nearby low-spray farm).
For lunch, we all had last night's leftover soup with my homemade bread. It's the second time this week that my dad's brought leftovers to work and heated them in the microwave (I think the first time was ratatouille), and he's really enjoying it. He usually just brings things like sanwiches, salads, fruits, and yogurt in his lunch. By contrast, my mom and I started eating more and more hot lunches we starting homeschooling five years ago, and it's now rare for the two of us not to cook three meals a day.
For dinner, my dad made corn on the cob (farmstand) and my mom made spaghetti (pasta from Flour City, garden tomatoes, farm stand garlic, Wild Card Item olive oil from Tuscany on Main, ricotta cheese made from our friend's goats' milk). She wanted to try out on a small scale the tomato sauce recipe from The Art of Simple Food, which she's considering making on a large scale and freezing or canning to preserve some of my garden's tomatoes. It was a little bland, but will work fine as a means of preserving a lot of tomatoes for winter.
After dinner, my dad and I spent time screwing on boards over the chicken wire on the lower part of the chicken coop to provide additional protection from predators. We think the killer is a weasel, because my dad read that weasels commonly kill only one chicken at a time, leave it after attacking, and come back to retrieve the body later. This fits the pattern of the killings of our chickens, and also fits because a weasel would be small enough and smart enough to get by the electrified wire we have going around the chicken coop. Hopefully, the additional protection offered by the boards will be enough. From what heard from other people, though, weasels can be a really hard predator to deter. Weasels enjoy killing for the fun of it, and people have lost whole backyard flocks.
I really hate this assumed weasel more than other animals that have preyed on my birds in the past. At church last year, one sermon suggested that the reason why we dislike certain people so much is that we find many of their worst traits uncomfortably familiar, because we may be trying to deny to ourselves that we possess these traits. Perhaps this lesson could be applied across species. Weasels, like humans, are highly intelligent predators that will also kill for sport.
Alternately, it may be that I hate the assumed weasel so much because many of the previous losses could be taken as lesson. For instance, it was almost as if the fox was telling me to make sure I put my turkeys away as soon as dusk began to fall when I lost my adult turkey tom because we stayed too late at dinner while the turkeys were free-ranging. With the assumed weasel, I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to learn. Many people, including my neighbor, let their hens free range during the day, while I've taken more precautions by keeping them in a moveable coop. Having plywood on the sides just isn't workable long-term solution, and even the electric gets to be a real pain over the long run (which is why we stopped in the first place). Perhaps the lesson from the assumed weasel is that these measures are necessary when younger chickens first go outside.
What happens though if the attacks don't stop when the chickens start perching off the ground at night, like I'm hoping will happen? Or what happens if it realizes that it would be easy to get into the barn and kills one of my young turkeys at night? What is the lesson then? I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. For now, I'm living with the fear of the unknown.
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