Natural Essays

Farm under siege

By Richard Phelps
Posted 5/18/23

It’s easy to be a pessimist, to let yourself go. If anything can go wrong, it will. Forget the chicken coop door for two hours (last night) and a fox will grab a hen and run down the driveway …

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Natural Essays

Farm under siege

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It’s easy to be a pessimist, to let yourself go. If anything can go wrong, it will. Forget the chicken coop door for two hours (last night) and a fox will grab a hen and run down the driveway until the wing rips off and the fox drops the wing to get the more fulsome reward of what remains of the old bird herself, in shock but no doubt still alive, passive. I found the wing in the dirt lane. The roadway was proving the fastest, easiest escape for the raider. Animals may be animals, but they’re not stupid. Fact is I was hunting bear when I found the chicken wing.

The dog was barking and furious we would not let her out as I dressed in the dark. I heard the chicken squawk, once -- a desperate sound. I thought it was the black bear, back again to tear off the chicken wire covering the open-air windows of the chicken bungalow coop and grabbing itself a nice morsel of Colonel Sanders. The bears have been so regular a nuisance, my suspicions were automatic. I assumed it was the bear and this thought found conviction when my 1 million candle watt flashlight reflected the shiny blue eyeballs of two bears just a pitching wedge away through the dense stand of young sugar maples, four eyeballs ablaze. I quickly swept the woods behind me for a third set. I’m a little jumpy. I had my old shotgun with me. The problem was the bears were on a direct line to my brother’s house so I could not shoot in the direction I felt would be most efficacious in bear behavioral modification. Now there is no way an old shotgun, twelve gauge or not, could ever reach my brother’s house, it being completely invisible and maybe more than a quarter mile away through thick woods, but still it was just the thought, and I could not break the rules of engagement learned in childhood.

I took a shot from a less productive angle and the bears did not move one foot but rather were in the same spot looking directly at me, assessing my every move. A second shot and they tumbled away through the trees in that awkward way of moving they have, yet silent as moonlight. After grabbing a couple more target loads from the box of shells on the piano lid, I jumped in my truck and drove out to the apiary, having a nightmare that maybe it was the bees I forgot to protect by not energizing the solar fence at the end of a hectic day of two swarm recoveries. The apiary was safe, but that was when I found the chicken wing. A sweep of the hayfield at the end of the greenhouse with my searchlight showed two greenish eyeballs which, for the way they jumped through the hay and turned to me to reassess its danger every twenty feet, could be nothing other than fox.

The bears were found innocent of this chicken raiding indiscretion, but the relentless spirit of the wilderness is quick to reclaim whatever humans think is their territory, or safe zone, or righteous domain. And it just goes to show it won’t take long for the fierceness of nature to reclaim everything once mankind spells out our own particular path to self-doom. Collectively, we have many to choose from. It strikes me that the balances of farming are fragile and as easily overturned, or thwarted, as forgetting a door latch. The culture around us is so intertwined and dependent on a string of satellites and wires and electricity that it is remarkable that it functions at all, and to me, I’m sorry, it seems so vulnerable, absolutely at risk. Or am I becoming a Cassandra? I need a good sleep.