Death on the farm.

Death on the farm.

It has been a wet winter and spring this year in South East Texas.  The Farmer’s Almanac nailed it again with their weather forecast.  I don’t know how they do it, but they always seem to get long term weather forecasts right. They say the upcoming summer will be a dry one here.  We shall see.  I believe what they print. If the Farmer’s Almanac ever writes that Global climate change is man caused, then I might finally get on board with that theory. 

Anyway, the small lake on our property has been full to over-flowing for months now from all of the rain we’ve been getting.  It is nice to sit with my wife, the Fetching Mrs. Intrepid Traveler, on the small dock that I built and absorb the simple beauty of the water and surroundings.  She and I have spent many evenings sitting on the dock, chatting about life.

One evening, as she and I were out there, I was casually tossing a lure into the water with my fishing rod.  I never catch anything worth keeping and said so.  She commented that in the nearly six years that we’ve lived at the farm, that she has never fished. I never really thought about that before, but I did not recall her ever doing it. That would not stand.

The very next day I went to the store and bought a tiny package of night crawlers for her to use as bait.  I figured her kind of fishing would be to cast and watch the bobber type of fishing so I rigged up a hook and float for her. I baited the hook with the worm, but that little fellow squirmed around so much that I almost could not do it.  His body was so pliable that I could hardly hold it tight enough to force the barb into it without mashing him flat.  And as soon as the worm realized that it is about to be skewered on to a pointed metal shaft it started thrashing about like it was being electrocuted.  I don’t blame the little fellow. 

My wife and I often anthropomorphize animal behavior by giving human traits to the wild creatures that we live with. We did the same to the night crawler.  We were imagining what it would be like to be that worm.  One minute you are comfortably buried in a lovely moist tub of compost in a tidy Styrofoam home.  Suddenly the roof is pried off, and these giant fingers appear out of nowhere and begin to re-arrange your living room furnishings.  You are rudely grabbed by the belly and jerked right off your couch.  Suddenly you are in the harsh open air and blinding light.  You are being squeezed by those monstrous fleshy fingers.  You vainly thrash about, hoping that somehow you will win your freedom. 

The monster fingers force a hideous spiked object right thru your guts!  What did you do to deserve this?  You were just minding your own business, at home, reading the Worm Street Journal, when your earthworm world was turned upside down.  Ouch!  You would scream for help but don’t have vocal chords.  You’d fight back but don’t have hands, feet or teeth.  How unfair is this fight, anyway?   Even with the giant barbed spike thrust right thru your body you continue to valiantly struggle.  The hook is tethered to a string that is connected to some kind of flexible stick.  What is this, some medieval torture device?  Suddenly you are flung out into space, like being on an amusement park ride.  But you are not amused.  You and the barbed torture mechanism abruptly hit water.  You can’t breathe!  And you can’t get off the hook.  You wonder to yourself can it get any worse than this? ....just as a largemouth bass bites off your head. 

Worms are not the only creatures that have had deadly human encounters because of us recently.  And it is not that my wife and I are bloodthirsty.  Quite the contrary. To paraphrase the worm’s situation, compost happens.  

We’ve tried to encourage more variety of wildlife to visit our property, so last year I built a duck nesting box.  We wanted Wood Ducks to build a nest in it.  I mounted the nesting box on a galvanized pole in about two feet of water on the edge of the lake.  I used the exact specifications provided by Texas Parks and Wildlife for the box. I made it from cedar so it would not rot, and put wire mesh inside it so the baby chicks could crawl out and drop down to the lake water right below the box.

I was checking on the duck box a few weeks ago, and noticed nesting material falling out of the bottom of the box.  That did not make any sense.  I got closer and realized that the bottom board of the cedar box had curled up and popped loose.  All the nesting material was falling out.  Worse yet, I saw eggs floating in the chilly water just below the box.  I counted a dozen eggs that were ruined.  I mentioned at the beginning of this piece that we had been getting a lot of rain lately so it appears that the cedar wood curled up from the moisture, and pulled the trim nails out that I used to build the box with. My poor choice of using too small of nails, meant I was responsible for the death of a dozen baby Wood Ducks.  Damn.  I slowly walked back to the house, dreading giving the news to my wife.

Fast forward to a day ago.  The fetching Mrs. Intrepid Traveler asked me to help her deal with a dead tree that was rotten and was starting to lean over the road near our barn.  It was about the size of a small telephone pole.  It was only being held upright by the branch of another tree.   She figured it would fall right in the road and block her from being able to drive out.  The “tree” was just a dead stump, about 20 ft. tall.  It had no branches since they long ago rotted off.  It was riddled with holes made by birds and other critters who like the high rise lifestyle.  This was the same tree that she spotted a small Screech Owl in last year.

I asked her if the owl was still living in the tree stump.  She said she hadn’t seen him for months.  We started pushing on one side of the tree, when suddenly a large bird flew from the top of it.  It was brown, and I could tell it was a raptor, but since I am not a bird guy I could not accurately identify it. We figured it was probably was the owl.  But now we had made the tree even weaker, so we had no choice but to finish the job. We pushed the tree over and it hit the ground with a big thump.  The stump broke upon impact and the rotten wood burst apart.  In the debris we spotted three small broken bird eggs.  The owl must have built a nest in the tree after all.

So the death toll for birds in the past few weeks is twelve that were my fault and three for the wife.  Both events were unplanned and unwanted.  But both were preventable.  It saddens me to know that we killed a generation of Wood Duck and Screech owls by our ignorance.  Bad humans.  Bad.

I hope the wild life here on the farm does not blame us for these tragic events.  We want to make a good environment for them to prosper.  That goes for the all the critters here; the mammals and birds, all the way down to the lowly worms.  In fact, I would have liked to hear the comments from our friend the night crawler about all of this.  But sadly, he cannot comment because he does not have a head.