One Down

Chivers admiring her spay scar which came back from the vet
painted a pretty silver (zinc?) colour and with very fetching,
dissolvable purple stitches. 

Enough of this foxy frivolity now, twirling the things round our heads by their tails. It all got much more serious last night and it's not anything you can tell funny stories about. We don't like doing it and we wish we did not need to. Some of our friends have objected in firm tones but, so far, they have accepted that we are all entitled to our own opinions. Foxes are definitely a controversial area which result in some heated discussions and forcefully put views. This post contains some text and pictures you might like to avoid, so I have deliberately included the material down-screen. It will not hit you when you first open the post, and if you want or need to avoid it then be warned. Do not scroll down this story.

We have had some very foggy mornings

It has been a painful time in which we have felt a bit 'pinned down', unable to leave the poultry out and un-attended because the two foxes we know about seem to work both night and day. Liz had her 'fox-flinging' event on Monday during the morning, and I saw foxes both Tuesday and Wednesday night. On Thursday morning Liz was given time off work because they had the auditors in, so I went shopping and Liz had another encounter, this time with no physical contact.

A lovely gift of eggs from Sue and |Rob.

Patrolling round the house, she stuck her head into the "empty" turkey house and looked along the building towards a low wall that divides it in two. Peeking at her over the wall was Mr Fox, who must have climbed half way up the chickens' perching ladder to look back at her. He scarpered before Liz could sneak the doors closed.

Copper Marans hen. One of 3 Marans hens who survived
Wednesday's attack (along with 2 roosters)

The foxes, though, were not going to be allowed it all their own way and on Thursday we upped the ante. We have borrowed a big cage-trap of proven ability and also welcomed a friend who lives nearby and who we know through Facebook, who came armed with a .22 rifle. I knew nothing of guns and had never even been close to a "Two two" so I was looking forward to seeing it in action. It is extremely accurate to 200 metres which easily met our needs. My job was going to be to hold the torch.

Fox cage-trap. The pale grey plate is the
pressure pad. The bait goes behind it.
Mr Fox stepping on the plate drops the
gate at this end of the trap.

In the event went very differently to the plans. Our first young fox got himself caught almost at the same time as my rifle-man was arriving, so was under arrest for barely 10 minutes and shot within the first 15 minutes of the visit. After that we never saw another fox despite walking all around the patch for almost 3 hours more.

A .22 Rifle and the result. The rifle was not really needed
in the event, a range of less than ten feet!

We think we heard the old vixen shouting from way away to the SW, possibly calling her now-dead child, but for us there were no eyes reflecting in our lights. It was very parky and we had dressed up warm for all the motionless, silent waiting. It was good every now and then to retreat back indoors for a hot drink and slice of cake. I had offered my man a share of our lamb ragu supper, but he'd eaten so much cake he was full up! We called it a day at around 7:30 pm, leaving the trap set in case our girl showed up on hearing the shooter drive away. She is no fool.

I woke up today, then, expecting a full trap but was disappointed; still set, open and empty. I was faced with another day of vigilance but wondered whether the big, dark vixen might keep to her 'Lizzie' schedule of mid-morning after the car had been driven away. I decided to keep all the birds shut in their bedrooms so that the only prey a sneaking fox would make contact with was the dead hen in the trap, bait. Again, no luck. Not a sign of her.

Sheep go from frosty to dry via steaming in the morning sun.

At 11:30 I let all the birds out and started my 'pinned down' anxious wait going about my chores but with my ears pinned back for the slightest squawk, honk or Guinea-cackle outside All I got were false alarms including one where the Guineas, flying up to a fence could suddenly see, from their higher viewpoint, where I had dropped my shot fox into long grass.

Christmas-Card morning where the
freezing fog last night had built long
fronds of needle crystal on plants

They could see enough red fur to trigger a positive fusillade of screams, cackles and raucous swearing which took me a few minutes to interpret - I'd raced round everywhere and knew there was no actual live fox about. I was trying to calm them and they were obviously yelling at my stupid, idiotic face "It's a fox! It's a fox! Look! Hiding in the grass!". If only I spoke Guinea Fowl.

Our lane this morning. 

We made it through to 4 pm, then, with no misadventures and it is now a huge relief to be able to shut away the birds and turn off the high-alert vigilance. It is no way to relax, let me tell you. Then, wouldn't you know it, I was through supper and had delivered Liz to the train station when the vixen showed up? I swear that lady knows that I have no gun and, unless she goes into my trap, no way of doing her any damage. My rifleman was only available that one night this week.

Just to add to the worries Liz has now hefted the little dead one by the tail and thinks that it is not, in fact, 'hers'. It is obviously a boy and she is sure that the one she was waving around did not have "that equipment". The angle she was looking at the animal from, she says, she would have noticed! This might mean that we actually have 3 foxes in this adventure, the vixen and 2 youngsters, a dog and a vixen.

More on all this as it progresses.

4:2 - a Final Score? A Sigh of Relief?

This funky chicken cushion has nothing to do with this
post but I love it!

Call me naive if you like, call this the triumph of hope over experience, even, but today I am at last daring to hope that we have sorted our fox problem, at least till these very mobile and fast breeding mammals move back into the territory, which they inevitably will. I now do my night time patrols believing that I might NOT now have to spot a pair of green eyes reflected back at me from near my rabbit runs or at the far side of a field. When I nip out to check on the number of chickens I am daring to beleive that there will be the right number and there will not be a sad puff of Buff feathers caught in the grass. When I hear the geese kicking off I am daring to guess that this is just the geese kicking off for no reason (as they commonly do) and NOT because they have spotted the instantly recogniseable shape of a loping fox.

Fox #2, A vixen, 43 inches nose to tail.

Why? Yesterday morning as I was constructing breakfast, I looked out over the snow-covered east field and saw what I believed to be my "10 pm fox" from earlier posts strolling in the sun. I clapped my hands and she ran off but left tracks in the snow giving away her sneaky 'hole' under the sheep fence. To cut a long story short, she has now been shot (cleanly and quickly again) and I think she was probably partner to the previous lad, so we may now have killed both the pair which would have had this territory. They would be mating about now but not yet have cubs in the den.

The perfect rifle range? Shooting downhill with all the
bogland as your back-stop (butts).

In the process of all this I have learned a great deal about shooting and safety (not that I am about to take this up as a hobby, I hasten to add). My picture shows the view north from our east field down the 'Bank Field' to the drainage stream and concrete 'kesh' (bridge) and into the 'whin' scrub where our shooters believe the foxes hide up (I hope 'hid' up!) during the day. Across the bog and way higher up is the nearest likely human 'target', the cars moving along the Balla road. Our rifle man can sit in my field with his fox-call (a whistle which makes a scream like a rabbit being badly injured) and then spot the fox approaching. He should be able to pop the animal between the eyes without any risk of a miss-bullet hitting anything. That's the theory, anyway. So far we have not needed to test this out as our 2 have fallen to shot-gun fire from closer range.

Thin grazing for the geese.

So, where are we now, apart from immensely (if a little warily and perhaps optimistically) relieved? Our advice is that the foxes will not be all gone and they will be back and back till we eventually run out of animals to "feed them on". Our 3 year run of fox free luck was a lucky abberation which we should not, if we are wise, rely on being back. Mentor Anne is firmly of the view that we should give up on the 'total free range' system and, instead pen the birds in decent sized runs surrounded by flexible 'net' style electric fencing. We could do this (the advice goes) in the orchard or one of the existing sheep-proof paddocks and use a wooden shed or wendy house out there as the coop(s), i.e. not bring the birds home each evening to the concrete out buildings as we do now.

A typical fence line here with 2 gates along it, the 'veg patch'
gate and the 'apiary' gate (blue and white)

We are now looking into all this, with all its many permutations - the cost of fencing, choice and design, suppliers, maintenance and so on. We may go down this road but I  sincerely hope we don't have to. I love my total free range system, where the chickens are on the front lawn one minute, then in the yard, then visible in the car-port or down among the veg raised beds.

Brambles outside the orchard fence.

I also struggle to see how we could make the thing work in our system where we have built everything thinking we would not need electric fences, so our hefty sheep fences and gates divide up a series of contiguous paddocks - the veg patch butts up against the orchard, which butts up against the pig paddock and then the east field. The sides of these paddocks which touch the property boundaries are hard up against hedges and they are commonly a mass of brambles 'outside' the good fence.

Frozen veg plot

The advice for the 'Flexinet' fencing (which is a soft 'curtain' of loose netting with the strands interwoven with the electric wires and the whole hanging from thin insulating plastic 'posts') is to hang it about a foot outside the existing paddock fencing. There, as they say, is the rub. To do it outside the orchard is to run it down my veg-plot main path, through 2 gates, then along the 'back' where a bramble thicket would need clearing, back up in the pig paddock and along the top (another path). I would also need to divide the orchard in half (temporarily and flexibly?) to keep the geese separate from the chickens. It might be possible to get a big shed which could be divided in two, geese at one end, chooks at the other, to straddle this orchard-divider. Finally, there is the height thing. The Flexinet is 1.2 m high at best (that is if you keep it taut and don't have lower loops between your posts) and my fox was happily clearing my 3-4 foot sheep fence the other day, so why is he going to run at this new fence and then stop to get a jolt off the mains before (rethinking the decision to..) go sailing over?

It's enough to turn a man to drink!

There's a lot to think about starting with whether we still want to keep chickens if we have to go to all this trouble and expense. We love them but they are relatively cheap beasts, so if I have to spend hundreds of Euro keeping them safe, should we not just be buying the eggs instead? Electric fencing is also notoriously NOT 100% fool-proof - everyone we know describes 'accidents' where they forgot to turn the fence back on after a job, or it shorted out or there was a power cut and the ravening beasts outside are said to be able to tell. They may be able to hear the clicks or sense the electric pulses, or they just try the gap just one more time and... ooh look.... I got straight through.

This, I sense, could run and run. For now though we have another dead fox to dispose of and a latest score this season of 4 dead chickens (3 and a head taken) vs 2 dead foxes. Dare we hope that this, for now is a 'Final Score' on this match? I am enjoying, for now anyway, a sigh of relief, but we have probably not heard the last from our red, brush-tailed chums outside the wire.