Tuesday, April 20, 2010... The Ruckus We Heard At 11:45 Last Night Was Real...

I heard a lot of noise outside last evening around a quarter til twelve, so I grabbed the rifle and spot light, before racing out into the night to see what was going on. One never knows... with our illustrious DEP officers constantly making the most intelligent of idiotic moves with our state's wildlife. You know, like releasing tons of coyotes to control the deer herds....unknowingly, doing this at the same time as the lousy insurance companies were doing same thing covertly, trying to reduce car deer collision claims.... The result, amazingly...now we had entirely too many breeding coyotes in New York State... What to do...What to do??? Ah yes, the most idiotic thing possible, right...let's release a bunch of Mountain Lions...you know? Puma... or cougars as they are called out west? That should clean up the coyote population, which are canines... Let's think about this a moment. Coyotes are from the canine family...better known as dogs, which are used to hunt cougars out west, because those dogs can run for miles and miles without tiring...sooner or later treeing their prey.
Why would I think these cougars they leave loose, would stray clear of these canine packs and target sissy sheep, Llamas, goats, cows or ALPACAS?
Anyway... I went out with the rifle and spot light last evening, looking for the result of the previous commotion. I found nothing except myself standing in the dark woods, listening to coyotes barking and bawling in the distant woods as they hunted some poor unfortunate animal. I listened to them for quite awhile, standing there beyond the cleared farm land, hoping to hear something or see something I could resolve, but I saw nothing more than I heard.
Fast forward, to this morning, as I walked outside to look around. I noticed immediately that both the male and female Canadian wild geese were swimming in the pond together... Odd, I thought! She was perking that clutch of eggs for the last two weeks or so. I immediately grabbed the camera and took off for the nest site and there it was. Devastated...almost beyond recognition as the nesting site of yesterday. The noise I heard was obviously the goose and gander, trying to fend off an opossum, skunk, fox, raccoon or coyote attack in the middle of the night. Being so close to the ponds edge, I would suspect a raccoon to be the culprit. They love marauding nests of duck and geese eggs as they mill along the ponds edge looking for crayfish or slugs, which they love. An occasional find consisting of a clutch of eggs is just a dessert supreme, for a coon.
How sad for the goose, who will still have enough time to re-establish a nest and have a few goslings before it is too late, provided she learned her lesson and will hide her nest better this time.
Today, we are taking Vick's parents shopping in Albany and stopping to pick up some hardware supplies to make a trumpet accessory for Vick's Dad before the big concert he is going to play in. We'll have lunch somewhere and enjoy the day before they depart this evening for home.
I'm kind of glad our trip to pick up Herbie the sheep has been rescheduled for a week or so from now. That gives us a little time to complete a few more tasks first.

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