Thu, 30 Sep 2004

An amazing morning

As is my habit, I went out this morning to tend to the meat birds, currently housed in the barn, at about 8:30 am. We have to feed them at least twice a day at this stage, despite their ranging, and I always fill up their water containers in the morning, too.

This morning, I was delayed a bit by having to replace the latch on the gate to the coop area: one of our rams had decided that chicken feed was really tasty, and had made short work of the gate mechanism yesterday to get at it. So it was probably about 9 when I headed back in to the house.

All of the sudden there was mayhem in the paddock: all of laying hens started squawking, flapping their wings and scattering in all directions. The sheep and goats headed under the trees, and from out of the southeast (flying out of the sun, interestingly enough) an enormous bird swooped down on the flock, grabbed one of the chickens and took off towards the old school! When I say "enormous", I mean that the predator's wingspan had to be 5 or 6 feet (1.5 m). The chicken it snatched wasn't one of my little white meat birds: this was a big one, weighing probably 10 pounds(4 kg)!! And it was fast - the whole thing, from the initial chaos to watching the predator disappear over the school took maybe 5 seconds.

Well, I came in and called the Indiana Wildlife Conflict line - and there have been reports of golden eagles in the area! [The photo is from the site.] We have all kinds of hawks around here, and vultures, too, but I've never seen (or heard of) a golden eagle in Indiana...

I can't shoot it: it's still an endangered species, and there's a pretty stiff fine, but if I can document losses the state will reimburse me. They told me to be on the lookout, as apparently once one of these guys finds "easy pickings", he'll be back. Just what I don't need right now ... but I will have to admit that it was really cool to watch!

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orangeguru wrote

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