Unwanted Guests

It happens. No matter how harmoniously you try to farm with nature, some critters have it in for you. If it’s not ravens running off with baby chickens, it’s the bobcat slaughtering your ducks. If it’s not the rabbits in the pea patch, it’s the voles climbing the tomato plants to eat three times their body weight every day. If it’s not the robins gorging in the raspberry patch, it’s the tent caterpillars in your apple tree.

Each year has its own challenges with pesky critters. One year, the voles may be driving you crazy—running off with your mousetraps, escaping the dog, digging tunnels everywhere, hollowing out your melons and squashes. The next year, you’ll hardly see a vole but the ground squirrels seem to be everywhere—tunneling under the garage, marauding the chicken feed, and shredding everything related to paper.

And then there’s woodchucks digging caverns under the barn, juvenile Bald Eagles terrorizing the chickens in their tractor pens, or coyotes howling in the night, spooking the newly-weaned lambs. Goodness, you might even find a snapping turtle caught in the pig pen!

Sometimes, we do our best to live with/around the critters. We’ve certainly raised a good crop of robins this year with the raspberries because the patch is too sprawled to cover with bird netting anymore. But sometimes these unwanted guests on the farm call for an all-out-war. I’m sorry if it doesn’t seem neighborly, but this is not a wildlife farm. Go live in the woods, be merry, and prosper. But if you start messing with my farm, watch out!

For years, back when we were mostly just visiting the farm as a getaway, woodchucks lived in the barn. One particular fat and sassy fellow (or lady, I can’t be sure) perched on an open door in the hay loft, basking in the morning sun, surveying the realm. Yet, while woodchucks have their own sort of charm (I suppose), their damages to the property outweighed their quaintness.

While Grandpa took care of the woodchuck population after they collapsed the original hand-dug well in the pump house, restoring the north wing of the barn back to a working dairy shone a new light on the plunder. Punching through the old stone-infused cement to see that the footings were solid, giant caverns were exposed that had to be filled, lest the whole wing should crack and cave in. Wouldn’t that be an unpleasant experience in the middle of milking! A considerable amount of concrete (and funds) went into those holes to make amends from the reign of the farm’s woodchucks.

So, when a teenaged woodchuck decided to move into the red barn early this summer, this was no laughing matter. We’d been woodchuck-free for at least ten years. This invader was certainly not welcome! After finding his hole and watching the little nose pop in and out from under pallets of hay, we made a plan to catch “Charlie” the woodchuck.

Using cement blocks to form a chute outside the hole, we baited a rabbit live trap with peanut butter. But we were concerned that, since Charlie had more length than a rabbit, he’d be able to get out after triggering the trap. So we threaded a stick through at the very back and smeared the peanut butter on that. This was set at the opening of the cement block chute. And then we left Charlie alone.

“I don’t think we’re going to catch it,” our intern Jake mused. “I don’t even know if woodchucks like peanut butter.”

But the next morning, when Jake peered around the corner of the barn and called in excitement, “We’ve got him!” it appeared that peanut butter was the right answer. In fact, Charlie seemed to like it so much that he’d eaten well into the stick as well. Later, Grandpa took Charlie for a ride out into the forest.

But the latest unwanted guest on the farm was a pigeon. Over the years, we’ve worked hard to keep the farm pigeon-free, since they are renowned carriers of diseases for livestock. Pigeons like farms, there’s usually feed to be found somewhere, and barns offer adequate protection from predators. But take a stroll at any feed mill or in a city, and you can see that there isn’t any threat to the global pigeon population.

Usually, we try scare tactics first, involving rocks, the dog, screaming, and chasing. Sometimes this is enough to convince the pigeon in question that our farm is no place to stay. Other times, it isn’t.

About two weeks ago, a white-headed pigeon began appearing on the farm, mostly ranging for spilled chicken feed behind the tractors. We’d chase after it, but the next day it would be back. We’d throw sticks and rocks, and still it came back. Lena would chase it for hours, but the little bugger just wasn’t learning. It was a pretty thing, for a pigeon, but it was going to have to go. No thank you fowl cholera, coccidiosis, or avian flu.

So we scrounged up Grandpa’s old 22 and waited for the bird’s imminent return.

“There he is, on the roof!” We had just finished picking the black currant bushes by our house when Jake noticed the speckled bird eyeing us from the top of our chalet. Then came the pursuit, off the roof, out in the field, back to the roof, back to the field, over the barnyard.

It was our intern Sam who caught a wing-shot, and they brought the captive home. And there came the end of the pigeon’s story, though we did eat its breast in a stir fry for dinner since no one had the heart to waste it. None of us really wanted to kill the bird if we didn’t have to, but prevention is the first line of defense in maintaining livestock health, which is much more important than entertaining an unwanted guest.

But now chores have returned to normal, with a watchful eye for the marauding creatures that know when you’re not looking. Hopefully, we’ll keep them at bay for another season. See you down on the farm sometime.