Sunday, February 1, 2009

True Story

Something has been eating Dad's chickens. For a while he was regularly catching raccoons, but I think after he got the hens all together in a pen (instead of having them roam free) the raccoon problem went away. Now that he has the birds penned, something's been digging underneath the pen to get to the hens. The roosters still roam, I think, and he's down to only a couple of them. I'm not sure how many hens are left, but he lost three hens last week.

Being the wonderful investigator that he is, he set up his deer camera to see what he was dealing with. Here's the culprit (That's a trap the chicken's in, by the way. Wouldn't you hate to be the slow one on the day Dad's picking a bird for the live trap):



He set some live traps but caught nothing. Next he got some steel traps from my granddad to catch the chicken killer.
Finally, this morning he had a good feeling. He took his pistol and went out just before daylight. He saw the cat then went back in the house to get a bigger gun. He had Mom hold the flashlight while he shot it twice. Once to kill it and once to make sure it was dead.

This being Sunday, he did what anyone else would do given the situation. He put the dead cat in the back of the truck and took it to church to show it off.

Nope, I am not kidding.
To those of you who recommend I write a book filled with these little anecdotes from country life - I now have some new material. Sometimes I really wonder why on earth anyone would live in the city like we do. Oh, the adventures we miss!
PS - Mom also sent a picture of the dead bobcat, too (kind of a before and after thing), but I decided to leave it off the blog.

4 comments:

April said...

Good gracious! You definitely have some material for your book. Wow that is something else...we are boring city folk, huh?

Nash Family said...

That made me laugh out loud! I can't wait to tell Tim. He just loves your dad! This will even impress him more. We used to have the taxidermied(I am not even sure that is a word) bobcat, that Tim shot when it came up the tree he was in while deer hunting, on our entertainment center! Oh the joys of country living!

Trey said...

I want to see the dead bobcat picture

Kelly said...

I agree--where's the dead bobcat? How big was it? Is there a weight to be impressed with? Let's just be thankful that it isn't in our parking lot like all those racoons last year....ahhh...high school is just like living in the country--you never know what's killing your chickens. (I'm not sure what that means either, but it sounds good.)