The Urban Human and the Rural Fox

It’s funny how relying on small, defenseless (and slightly stupid) fowl for a part of your food can manage to make you re-assess your view of all nature’s creatures, great and small, feathered and fanged.

Now, we have slaughtered and eaten our roosters.  We are used to death out here, we loose our hens on occasion to heat stroke, disease, being egg bound.  We’ve lost baby a baby duck to a snake.  The turkey to his genes.  But it never quite hit me that, living this way, I would have to deal direct death to keep my flock alive.  Or how much we have forgotten what a part of life dealing death once was.

It first started thinking about it after loosing several birds, mostly, but not all, quite young, to falcons and hawks.  I love hawks.  Always have.  So I had never really needed to question the other side of the remarkably strict federal laws protecting birds of prey.  You are not only not allowed to kill a bird of prey but you are not allowed to harass a bird of prey in any way.  The consequence of so doing is a rather hefty fine or jail time or both.  Pretty remarkable, since you can harass a fellow human with much less penalty. Anyway, it was only when I started loosing hens to them that I thought of how far we have gone from our rural roots.  If we were still a country with small holders, if we produced any of our own food instead of going to the supermarket, the law never would have been passed.  Certainly not as strict as it is.  You CAN harass a bird of prey if it has attacked your animals, but the burden of proof is on the human and is extreme – seems you need photos of it personally killing your flock.  I suppose you need to get a name, id, obvious characteristics and a mug shot to identify the harassed bird as the one in the photo to keep yourself from jail and bankruptcy…

And now we have a fox.  Well, possibly two, but at least one.  And we now have a flock that is half the size it was two months ago.  Thanks to the fox.  When I first started seeing him I tried my best to be a good soul.  He’s a good boy, the fox.  Plays with stray baseballs.  That kinda thing.  For months he has been around and I’ve tried to scare him, to detour him, to trap him, tried to be humane.  And I was a little stupid.  He wasn’t very good at hunting those several months ago.  For instance, the second time I saw him, about four months ago, he strutted straight into the back yard toward the rooster.  The Roo called all the girls to him and sixteen ticked off chickens marched on the fox.  The fox would get down to pounce and the chickens would rush him and he would get scared and back away.  He would crouch again and the chickens would all rush him again.  This continued several times till I went out and scared him off for good.  Well, for good that day.  He wasn’t very good at finding cover months ago.  Now he is.  He wasn’t very good at catching the girls months ago.  Now he is.  At first he took to dragging the hens past the traps I set for him and into the forest.  Such contempt.  We caught possums, we caught raccoons.  But not him.  And I can’t get him.  Now I hardly see him.  Never, until it’s too late.  I spend a heck of a lot of time hunting this damn thing.  We can’t let the chickens free range anymore.

Had I let myself take him out when he was bad at this, I would have a lot more time, and a lot more chickens…

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~ by rjw on 07/01/2011.