Do we have a responsibility, an obligation, to the wild things living alongside us on our farm? When our needs crash head-on with their needs, is there another path, any arbitration, besides “might is right”? Such are the questions that arise on a regular basis as we try to care for the land, keep our animals healthy and alive, produce food for ourselves and our customers. Thankfully, both the scale and the pace of a small farm allow for a little more finesse than for the commercial operation, room for a little more thought before pulling the metaphorical and literal trigger.
Our operation is an A-Z, where livestock are born and raised to maturity before being loaded and transported to the slaughter, where we hand them over personally to that fate. It is, in fact, completely the opposite of an industrial model. There, the meat and veggies are grown en masse to keep the grocery shelves stocked, the killing and bloodletting are done respectfully off stage, and the costs to the natural world are too often ignored.
Recently the farmers just to our north alerted us to a fox that had raided their ducks and ducklings, devastating the flock in a short week or two. Their awareness of the loss happened slowly. Especially in the case of poultry, when you’re feeding a large number (as in 15-20) morning and night, you can be forgiven for not noting that one or two are missing from the flock. Chickens, ducks, and the sort are renowned for hunkering down on a clutch of eggs in the dark, remote corner of a barn or a patch of weeds. Slowly, as the days pass, it becomes apparent that you have only a handful. Then two. Then none.
One day, after the idiomatic horse had left the barn, the neighbors began to heed the alarm … and saw the fox. We knew of this, long before any predations on our farm. I had met with the young couple to discuss a mutual fence a couple of months earlier. We walked the farm boundary as they discussed their plans, mentioning in passing the reason for further fencing: to protect their poultry from a duck-decimating fox. I did nothing with this news.
Then our wide-roaming flock of speckled Sussex chickens began to thin. They must be setting on nests, we speculated. It was only after I discovered a pile of downy chicken feathers in a pasture, then another outside the barn, that our suspicions were raised. It was only then that we began to check for hens. Nary a chicken was to be found nesting in the various outbuildings. Our search ended with only three hens and two roosters total. Closing the proverbial barn door, we clipped wings and secured the paltry poultry numbers in our large, enclosed chicken yard. Shortly thereafter, Cindy met the fox, up close and personal, with the dogs in hot pursuit. And I learned from the neighbor just to our south that a vixen and three kits were denned in his derelict barn.
We were thankful that we had incubated eggs and hatched 30 Sussex chicks just two months earlier. Those future egg layers were already secure in a brooder. (Although, to be sure, no eggs are expected from that quarter for another four months, ours is a household flock and economy, and a dozen eggs a week from the three surviving hens is more than enough to sustain us in omelets and baked goods.)
In part as a response to the immediate threat, I baled hay in the lower field, bush hogged the overgrown strips of grass on the drive, mowed in the new orchard. In short, I cleaned up the farm to make traversing open spaces a chancy proposition for a hungry mother. Even so, each evening for the next few days, the fox was still spotted, at least one of those times with three kits in tow, on our drive or in our bottom field. I took a few shots with my .22 rifle (I am, after all, no candidate for sainthood) but missed in the fading light (for I am also no Andy Oakley).
Last week one of the kits was run over and killed a mere dozen yards from our driveway. Just another of the countless wild things whose lives are paid as tax to fuel our greed. We now keep our dogs out at night, as do our duck-rearing neighbors. Perhaps, we hoped, the canine presence, along with the mowing, the keeping of all our mutual flocks better protected, had contributed to zero new sightings of the fox and her offspring.
The predator: destroyer of flocks, depriver of omelets.
Foxes den and birth in January and February, with mother and kits going their solitary ways in June. We assumed they had dispersed and left the area, until the mother was spotted and photographed a couple of days ago, a short hundred yards from our farm. One would have thought that the magnificent animal the fox is would be all the more so after a few months of especially luxurious dining. Instead, the vixen looked ill, thin and mangy, hardly the fearsome predator who had taken down two flocks of poultry in a half-mile radius. Such was her appearance that had she been in my rifle sights when that picture was taken, my aim would have been unsteady, wavered from its intent.
To be sure, I will kill both livestock and wild to provide food and protect our livelihood, and I will hunt the occasional small game. There remains a loaded rifle near the front door to remind all of that tendency.
But (and this is my reminder to myself), there is a path and protocol for us on our small farm. Stewarding the land is a sincere goal that encompasses much. It begins by asking ourselves this: Have we done the work to provide the right balance to foster a place where the farmers, the livestock, and the community of wild things can share this valley?
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Reading this weekend: The Supper of the Lamb (R.F. Capon) and The Southern Tradition at Bay, a history of postbellum thought (R.M. Weaver)
