Snake Eyes

It's been a hot summer so far up here on Cardinal Ridge.  Temperatures have stayed near 100 degrees for the last couple of weeks and rain has been scarce.  We've kept the garden on life support with some sprinkler drenchings after the sun goes down and learned how chickens look when they pant.  The dogs are lazier than ever.  We can't leave Otto outside for longer than a few minutes without him taking a field trip down to the creek and coming back with his undercarriage filthy with mud.  The dry heat seems to keep the grass growing a little slower so I have been able to spend more time playing on the floor with Matilda under the ceiling fan.

the thicket

The berries were especially bountiful this year.  A big thicket of wild blackberries rose up at the bottom of the apple orchard along the driveway.  We were able to fill 4 buckets full, but as slow and thorny as that work is, I think blackberries should rival gold in price per oz.  We snacked on the tart, seedy little treats while they were fresh and then put up 6 jars of blackberry preserves.  Matilda is a big fan of the blackberry, but her favorite berry is definitely the raspberry.

blackberry beast

We planted a thornless raspberry bush next the garage when we moved in and two years later we finally got a decent harvest this year.  Every night when April arrives home with Matilda we walk over and pick all the ripe raspberries for her, enjoying listening to her as she happily chomps down and coos, "MMMMNNNN!"  Two blueberry bushes we planted in whiskey barrels also hit their stride this year producing a nice bounty; but we lost one of the two bushes we planted in the ground due to the heat.

putting up blackberry preserves

The apples and peaches have suffered this year.  They both need a good number of days with below freezing temps in the winter to go dormant and conserve energy for the spring and summer.  This winter was mild and short so they never really shut down; spring came early and was really wet.  The apple trees are covered in water spouts,  thickly leafed with very few apples.  Cedar apple rust has covered many of the leaves with golden raised scabs, inhibiting photosynthesis and reducing yields.  The peaches are almost a total loss.  We haven't harvested a single one and it's not looking like we will.  The cytospora canker has worn them down;  the wet spring & brutal heat are just the nails in the coffin  Matilda seems to enjoy munching on the few apples we have, even though they are still really tart and weeks from fully ripe.  There's always next year...

Our raised beds are doing great.  The heavy rains in March and April got the tomatoes, tomatillos and hot peppers off to a roaring start and they have continued to thrive through the long, sun-drenched days of May & June.  We'll be getting back to  making our spicy golden tomatillo salsa this after focusing mostly on the red tomato based stuff last year due to a dearth of tomatillos.  We spent Fourth of July pulling carrots and beets out of the lowest raised bed and April found an awesome recipe for Moroccan raw carrot salad.  It sounds like the last thing you would want to pair with hot dogs and hamburgers to celebrate American independence, but Morocco was the first country to recognize the new United States in 1777.  Think grated carrots, lemon, cilantro, garlic, olive oil & spices.  It's surprisingly awesome and the full recipe can be found here(we left out the cinnamon and substituted jalapenos for the harissa).  We steamed some beets,  threw a few links on the grill and enjoyed a mellow 4th on the porch.

making Moroccan carrot salad & Chioggia beets

There is a strange cycle of dominance with our roosters that is both fascinating and heartbreaking.  The current King of the Coop is Chet who usurped that position from Bad Bird.   Bad Bird had been hyper-aggressive towards April, Clyde, and I before a duel with Chet that left him near death when I found him gasping for air deep in the woods.  I separated him from the flock and nursed him back to health with another sick hen in the barn next to the coop.  One morning, I went to check on the convalescing duo and discovered a pile of feathers on the dirt floor.  Bad Bird had repelled an assault by either a raccoon or possum on the hen and somehow survived the fight.  That was when I fell in love with Bad Bird and we became inseparable.  He began to follow April and me around the garden and orchards.  Where he once would strike aggressive postures and charge, he just meekly hung around and pecked for bugs.  Even his beef with Clyde was put on ice once he lost his crown. It was amazing how the new pecking order seemed to be recognized across inter-species lines.  Clyde and Bad Bird began to co-exist peacefully once there was nothing left to prove with regards to dominance.

Saturday: I walked out into the soupy humidity to find the two previously submissive roosters attacking and pecking the living crap out of Chet.  My first thought was to find some gloves.  Chet would never allow me to pick him up without some serious resistance from beak and spurs.  After donning gloves, I got between Chet and Wang, the Sumatran fighting cock.  Turns out I didn't need those gloves.  I recognized the same labored, raspy breathing in Chet as when I had found Bad Bird in the woods.  His comb was tattered and bloody.  I scooped him up and held him in my arms for the first time.  Chet was docile as I put him in the other side of the coop where the little biddies had been living.  I got him some fresh water and made sure he drank a bit, then I left him to recover in a dark corner of the coop.  The king had been usurped.

Sunday morning: I walk out into 90 degrees before 9 am.  The kind of heat that sucks the energy from you and sticks to your skin like sweaty syrup.  The day did not begin well.  I let the big birds out and then opened the door to the chick's side of the coop.  A Blue Andalusian lay prone in the sawdust; stiff with rigor mortis.  I picked up the pullet and saw the entire body was intact, no obvious wounds or bites.  The head was still attached and the vent had not been gnawed out, this was not a weasel or possum casualty.  What caught my eye was the matted, damp feathers from the head down to the neck, the beak had been slightly crushed, there were shallow cuts along the trachea.  It looked like something tried to swallow the chick and got hung up on the body, the chick was too big to eat whole and had suffocated while the predator tried to cram it down its throat.  A snake.

The other chicks had crowded around Chet, I believe he attacked the snake and drove it out of the coop. A snake will usually never leave the scene of the crime especially with more victims readily available.  Chet looked even more torn up than he did the day before, there were fresh wounds on his comb.  I walked back to the house hurting from the heat and the loss of the baby bird.  I told April I wanted to move all the chicks over to the other side of the coop where the other roosters might provide more protection.  After breakfast, we walked back out to the coop and commenced Operation Relocation.  I caught the pullets one by one, handing them off to April who placed them into the other side of the coop.  Once we were finished, I told April I wanted to dig up the corpse of the Blue Andalusian from the compost pile to get her medical opinion on what had killed it.  Before I could  plant the shovel into the pile of wood chips, April was shouting, "SNAKE! SNAKE!"  April does not like snakes.  I looked down around my flip flopped feet and saw nothing.  She pointed up around shoulder level, toward the gate to the coop and I saw this:

black snake caught in the bird netting

My first instinct was for revenge.  I wanted to shoot that snake straight through its head with the Ruger 10/22 or my Daisy Red Ryder,  avenging the chick without blasting the coop to pieces.  As I examined the snake, I saw its considerable girth somehow wound through tiny openings in the plastic bird netting, the thin black nylon cutting deeper and deeper into its scaled hide.  I thought about the reptilian brain; cold, remorseless; a killing machine that feels no pain.  At that point, I believed the snake was sure to die.  Doomed to slice itself to pieces writhing against the netting in the heat until it expired, a death not befitting a warrior.  I felt it would be right and merciful to kill it quickly with a couple shots to the head.  April retrieved my BB gun and I loaded it and test fired a few shots against a stump.  I don't know what came over me next.  I just could not stand to kill the snake without trying to save him.  He did not deserve salvation, not after killing a chick.  But death had already visited the ridge that morning and I would be damned if it returned by my hand.  Life is too precious, even the life of a black snake.  I hatched a plan to cut the snake free and throw him into a chicken feed bag; relocate him to the back acreage by the cabin a long ways from the coop.  It took almost an hour of slow, methodical cuts to loose the snake.  The serpent never got aggressive towards me, even as the knife slid under its scales into its corpus into order to cut the netting.  I swear I saw an almost human gratitude in its eyes as it regained freedom of movement with each cut.  My mistake was to not get a firm grip on him behind his neck before I sawed the last strands binding him to the netting.  The snake slid off like a black rocket towards the entrance to the coop.  I panicked.  I could not lose any more chicks.  I grabbed a hoe rested at the entrance to the coop, walked into the coop, measured the distance and swung; decapitating the snake I had worked so hard to save.  It took several more swings before I was satisfied that the wounds were mortal.  I scooped the snake's body onto a pitchfork and buried him as far from the chick as possible in the compost pile.  I can not explain the feelings you experience going from savior to executioner in seconds flat.  The moral dilemma of the gentleman farmer.