Bredbo Valley View Farm

There was a major offensive on the Garlic front yesterday. A lot of weeding and replanting of accidentally weeded plants happened. The boys have friends over for sleepovers – usually they have more during school holidays but this time it’s been a little slow.

You wouldn’t believe it either. After yesterday mornings fox attack the stinking thing came back again about 10:30pm. The cook heard the chickens squawking as she went in for a shower, I raced up to see what was going on. It was a bright moonlit night, but I didn’t want to open the chicken house up before I had a torch. The cook brought one up and we went in, thankfully there were no dead bodies. But, one of the silky roosters was making noises from the bottom end. The Cook shone her torch in the general direction and spotted the fox trying to hide in a bush. I picked up a piece of wood and in a mess of flailing arms went after the fox. I connected a couple of times but I don’t think I did any damage. I threw a huge chunk of timber at him and missed – it was pretty intense for a time. The fox ended up escaping through a hole he pushed in the wire – the dogs saw him off this time and he didn’t come back all night.

After we’d calmed down I thought I’d take a look and make sure that he hadn’t killed anything. I bent down under one of the roosts, but failed to notice that Gob the turkey gobbler was sitting on it. Well he must have worked up a good one in all the excitement and dropped it right on the back of my head – lovely I thought, must wash my hair before I go to bed. I didn’t find any casualties so I hope the fox lucked out.

The Cook is reinforcing the chock pen at the moment. Due to her German heritage I can see this will be better then the Atlantic Wall. As long as it keeps the poor old chickens safe.

So the animal count for inside of the house is one guinea pig, two piglets, two injured roosters, a dozen incubating turkey eggs and twenty chicks - in others words, I now offically live in the barn.

There’s always something. This morning I heard a commotion in the chook pen and doddled off in my slippers to investigate. We had lost eight of our new hatchlings over the past couple of weeks so I’ve been a little worried about foxes. Anyway I couldn’t see anything, the chickens were making a bit of a racket still, but I figured what ever it was it was gone.

Anyway, I was coming out of the house later, the turkeys were gobbling away and I thought every thing was fine. Then I saw a fox jump onto the roof of the chook pen! I thought at first I might be able to get a photo of it for the Blog, but the camera was in the car. So I tried to sneak up to the chooks and give it a good wack with a bit of wood. I thought I saw it jump down onto the ground, but then I saw it on the roof and it saw me and took off. Maybe there were two, I don’t know.

So I took a look in the chook pen and I was gob-smacked. I thought I’d seen the fox/foxes on the way in but obviously it was the way out. The pen was littered with dead chickens, all our Silky hens and a couple of roosters, our layers, Ricki the Rooster – Bens favourite, the last of the young chickens, one of our Pekin/Hamburg cross rosters and our last red Bantam hen. We only have a couple of Hamburg Hens and a handful of Roosters left. They didn’t touch the ducks or turkeys.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get organised enough to get a firearms license, which is obviously becoming more and more necessary. We were only talking about it last night at dinner. The sheep that are agissted on the hill have lost a number of lambs to foxes this year as well.

So – adding to the ‘to do’ list - back to the drawing board with fox proofing, get a gun license, hunt foxes and hatch more chickens.

Funny thing is, yesterday when the Cook went to kill the black rooster poor old Ben wouldn’t let her. So the rooster came back, the foxes didn’t kill him either. So I think we are stuck with that one. Ben did say it was a lot nicer to him yesterday afternoon.