Leaving Their Mark, Despite Their Untimely Demise

Longtime readers may remember the chicken massacre that happened 15 years ago or so. I went to feed the chickens and found a bloodbath has happened in the night. It took us a few weeks to figure out how the marauders got in and who they were -- it was probably some raccoons who figured out they could push a loose piece of roofing up and climb in over the wall.  From that day on, raccoons have been one of the lowest life forms, in my view. They kill for entertainment, not even eating the heads, just leaving dead birds strewn around. That time, there were 18 mangled chickens lying in a flurry of feathers, with the survivors wandering around in the battle zone.

So on Sunday morning when my mother was trying to get her chores done quickly before going to market, she found the same scene. She didn't have time to deal with it then so it was left to me to go and clean up, after finishing my CSA duties. This time was less shocking because I had seen this before. 

I fed the remaining chickens some leafy greens and went around picking up the bodies, holding them by their feet and putting them in a basket.  The killers had ripped off a piece of rotting plywood from the back wall and found a good-sized hole for coming and going.  There were 7 dead and 6 missing. That's a lot of chickens to take away. I wonder how many raccoons there were.

Longtime readers may also remember that I have an ongoing eco-terrorist practice, filling groundhog holes with buckets of rotting vegetables and sour milk. Groundhogs like a tidy, clean hole so I try to keep trashing their residences, whenever I have a chance. It really slows them down. Sometimes it takes them days to get back to eating beans or endive while they dig out from the disgusting mess I have left -- I also plug the hole tightly with sticks and logs, making life extra difficult.

So these chickens who never did anything wrong in their lives, they were just being chickens, they had one more opportunity to leave their mark.  I took those baskets of dead chickens and I went tromping around in the underbrush, finding the active holes. I stuffed a dead chicken in each hole. Groundhogs are vegetarians but foxes and raccoons are not, and maybe the others will help to clean up, but in any case, this will change the patterns of the groundhogs for a while.

Jon put some more boards on the  back of that ramshackle chicken shed. I feel like chickens might not have too much memory. They might not dwell on that scary night, or I hope not. They did not appear to be traumatized.

In fact, these are the retired chickens, the ones who are being sold for soup, so they are nearing the end of their lives. I guess they don't have a choice or a preference between getting eaten by people or by raccoons, but it bothers me that they would be killed and wasted. And that is why I crawled around under all the pricker bushes, sliding down the hills, looking for the holes under the piles of brush. I know it's crazy but it makes me feel better.

Wrangling Pigs

We had a nice take-out dinner from Sweet Ginger, with sushi and Pad Thai, for our last dinner with Mika and Benjamin and Yael. Mika ate sushi with great enthusiasm, clearly an experienced sushi eater.  We were loading them in the car, having a calm farewell when Jon came out of the house, "Helen says there are four police at the farm and two pigs are out."  Oy.  Rebecca got on one golf cart and I got on mine, even though we had no idea what we were going to do.  The Israelis left, already forgotten in this moment of crisis. 

The pig pen has an overgrown, bramble-filled lot on the side that is bordered by the deer fence. I looked at the fence and saw where they might have wiggled under it.  A bored and hungry pig can squeeze through a pretty tight space.  The police said they had found two pigs at the dumpster at the school next door, on the other side of the lot.  They were looking for them because someone called in a report of two pigs on Route 7. Oy.  There were two policemen somewhat close to the pigs, but unable to reach them because it was too snarly with vines and prickers.  The other police officers were hanging out at the pigpen, watching us think about what to do.

I was wearing a tank top and skirt and crocs, but since I was the "owner" and I am responsible for the pigs, I plunged into the underbrush, where I have seen deer crashing through the corner where a tree fell on the fence, falling from the lot toward our side. I have never been over there before. Lots of English ivy, wineberries, brambles, vines. I stumbled through this mess, following some deer trails until I found the pigs, stuck between two parallel fences, running back and forth. Not at all clear how they got there, or how they were going to get out. The police told us to bring them some grain and they would try to lure them out to get them into a truck. We thought that was really unlikely. I couldn't figure out how they got into that no-man's-land alley. There were three parallel fences: our deer fence, a chain link dog fence three feet away, and then a four foot woven wire fence that was in crumpled condition. The pigs were stuck between the dog fence and the woven wire fence, trying to figure out how to get back home.

It seemed like the only way to get them back into their pen was to cut a hole in this fancy, secure old dog fence and get them closer to the deer fence and then coax them back underneath the deer fence. Rebecca had to go find a bolt cutter in the barn and hand it to me through the fence and across the gap through the next fence, Helen had to climb the poison ivy covered deer fence to pass a small bucket of grain to me, which I grabbed from them with the bolt cutter. I cut a pig-sized hole and then it took a while to convince them to go through there, with grain and pig-talk.  Then Helen and Rebecca put a lot of grain on the ground where the wiggle-hole was, and lifted the fence with some cinder blocks. Eventually the pigs ate their way back home. Getting back out of that forest tangle (reminded me of a fairy tale where a prince forces his way through the brambles and blinds himself) was harder than getting in. Jon blocked the hole with pallets, tying everything down with baler twine, flashlight held in his teeth.

We all went home to take showers. There was a lot of poison ivy involved. We all missed Peio.