Chicken issues, a good evening

Mama contacted the buyer of George to see if everything worked out in adapting him to the new coop. Things, it turns out, were not so good. The buyer has, in addition to chickens, ducks, geese, and guineas. The ducks and geese were not an issue. The guineas were. All seven of the guineas in the coop are males and George had to fight the combined lot of them through the entire day yesterday. As of last night, he was holding his ground against the onslaught. One or two more days of conflict and all should settle down. I am glad he is a big rooster. Guineas are mean and he will have to beat every one of them back. I am confident Mama will not sell Big Daddy (another rooster for sale at our farm) to this buyer if, in fact, George does not make it in his fight to be accepted into the coop. It is one of the ongoing issues Mama has with chickens when we have to integrate them into a coop where the pecking order has been established. If I ever doubted the idea of a pecking order, raising chickens certainly proved its existence in that species.

On the less amusing side, we have lost several chickens lately. Mama counted last night, and we are down to 39 large hens and 8 Banty hens. That means we have lost five hens recently. Two of those five were found dead in the coop. Probably egg bound. The other three and two roosters that went missing, were probably taken by coyotes. That is not horrible, but it is troubling. We have seen the plundering firsthand on only one occasion, but it seems to be an ongoing event. Last night the coyotes were howling nearby. It is an eerie sound that carries over the pastures with a frightening closeness. I am not sure how close the coyotes were last night, but they would have been within sight if we had looked close enough. All of our dogs went crazy defending us and the farm. The cacophony was impressive.

Pastor called me Monday morning to see if I was available to go fishing Tuesday morning. Unfortunately, I was not, but we set a time for when I would get off work at 4 pm yesterday. He was right on time. We loaded the boat and gear in his truck and drove all the way to the quarry lake. Just kidding. It only takes about two minutes to drive to the east side of the lake where we typically put in. We were set up and trolling out withing fifteen minutes. Initially it looked like we were going to get skunked. In over an hour we had caught only one medium sized bass. I caught a black crappie in that first hour, which excited the pastor, but he had caught nothing. After not getting any bites as we fished the perimeter of the lake, even though we had changes lures several times, we headed back to the place where we I had caught the first bass and crappie.

When we got to that spot, we started to really fill the stringer. Pastor and I alternated catching fish. Mostly bass on his part. Mostly crappie on my part. One of those bass was easily a four pounder. Most of the others were between one and two pounds each. The crappie were large. About the size of a dessert plate. It was getting pretty late when we finally headed back to the truck. By that time, we had sixteen fish on the stringer. Most of those caught in the last hour of fishing. About twenty-five pounds of fish altogether. It was fun. The last time we had gone out together we had not had as much time to fish but we had caught five bass. This time, in spite of the muddy conditions, we had much longer to explore the lake and find where the fish were biting. That is likely to change each time we go out. Pastor took all the fish home with him to fillet. Once the fillets are bagged, he will split them between us. I was not opposed to that idea at all. Mama is excited about getting that many fish for our dinners.

The aluminum boat we have been using to fish the quarry lake is stationed at our house. With Pastor’s permission, I am going to retrofit and repair it to make it a bit more serviceable for me. There are a couple repairs that need to be made. All of those are on the upper sides of the boat. I would like to find and add seats to the boat, but not at the cost of easily storing the boat or inhibiting our getting into and out of the boat. Only small challenges are required. Fortunately, I have the shop equipment to pull that off. I am already imagining ways to load and unload the boat by myself. It is about twelve feet long and weighs about eighty pounds. Just a tad large for one person to manage until I figure out how to set things up for me to do by myself. There has to be a simple way to get that done if I study on it.

This could be fun.