After a week of daily purging via snap and walk-the-plank traps, I think Hunter and I finally got the last of the mouse population out of the barn.
Only had two in the traps this AM … which I suspect trickled in from outside the barn.
All said and done … I think we pulled about 30-40 mice out of the barn. I think even Hooey is tired of mouse munching. I heard her mumbling about skunks and coyotes last night, so I think she’s ready to move on to bigger prey. 😉
The electronic mouse traps were a TOTAL BUST. Can’t stand them. Waste of money. Still need to write a 2-star product review on Amzn.
Headed out to rotary plow a garden extension, and saw something out of the corner of my eye. Somehow, one of the new rabbit kits from the Dome 1 colony mysteriously ended up about 120 feet outside the dome!
In hindsight, but bun was sort of ‘damp’ head to toe, so I’m thinking somehow it got out of the dome, Hunter found it, and she carried it in her mouth to the area I was working in.
While she’s treated to rabbit “parts” when we harvest meat from the colonies … she also smart enough to know that baby bunnies, when alive, are not food, but family members to be protected.
THANK GOD the bunny is pure white and not grey, or Hooey would probably have mistaken it for a mouse and just munched it, as she’s currently dispatching about a dozen mice a day from the barn as we trap them.
Been an interesting morning already. 2 of 3 mice escaping Hunter’s dispatch … releasing a sick rabbit (Houdini) into the wild … and now finding a few new bunnies (kits) underground in the Dome 1 colony, which was only constituted a few weeks ago.
If you review the video from a few weeks ago when I migrated the first few does from Dome 2 to Dome 1, you’ll see that I commented on how fat the matriarch doe was … obviously about to pop with a new litter of kits.
Well … apparently she did!
2018.05.08 UPDATE: New Litter Top Side
I just went out to feed and water the two dome colonies and found the new litter in Dome 1 to be top side en masse. As always, they are just so damn cute.
I’m working pretty aggressively to combat the current disease outbreak in both domes. I’ll be monitoring these little guys daily for symptoms.
I’m still working my butt off trying to figure out why I have so many sick juvenile rabbits in both geodesic domes (colonies). It’s either Cocci or Mucous Enteritis (ME). The mortality rate has been pretty high (about 75%), so I suspect ME.
After doing some research on ME, I put the two most recent symptomatic (severe abdominal bloating, diarrhea, severe pain exhibited by teeth grinding) rabbits into a hospital cage and provided them a special diet (dark green leafy veggies, carrots, apples) and Pedialyte with a little pineapple juice.
One of the two (I call her Houdini) escaped from the hospital cage 3 times. I found her outside the hospital cage, and outside the surrounding enclosure cage, just eating grass this AM.
Soooo, I released her into the wild. She is still sick, and now at risk of falling to any of the numerous predators around here, but through her behavior, she made clear to me her desire to not be in a cage. So be it. With my blessing, she’s now free to experience whatever life has in store for her.
Historically, I’ve relied upon Dakota Alert sensors to detect and monitor motion around the property. I really like the MURS band sensors, because I can not only monitor activity from the Dakota Alert base station, but also with off-the-shelf MURS radios (e.g. handheld, mobile). For that reason, I still use the DA gear.
However … I recently started evaluating the 1/4 mile “long range” gear offered by Guardline. Each base station supports up to 16 motion sensors, which have proven to be very effective.
My only issue with the Guardline system vs. the Dakota Alert is in how the alarms annunciate. The DA alarms with a synthetic voice that says “Alert! Zone [#]” where # is zone number. The Guardline system associates what amounts to a ring-tone like on your cellphone with each sensor. I prefer the DA method, but am getting used to the Guardline tones. Oddly enough, so is my dog! I swear to God … when a tone goes off, her head snaps to where that sensor is on the property and she looks for ANYTHING there to bark at (e.g. deer, UPS truck, coyote, …). Smart dog.
2018.05.08 UPDATE … Guardline Sensor Range Test (Success!)
To test the new Guardline remote sensors, I recorded the base station while driving a tractor around a section of the perimeter path that took me through three discrete sensor zones, as you can determine by the three different “ring tones” heard on the video.
The senors are said to have a 1/4 mile range. In my case, they are 607 feet (0.12 miles) from the base station, which is well within published range. But, they are lower in elevation (down hill) from the base station, with a rather large stand of trees between them, so I was quite impressed they worked at that range, in those conditions.
Damn! Look at all the yellow pollen on the surface of the two base stations (BTW, that’s the Dakota Alert base on the right, which monitors other motion sensors). I just wiped them down last week. Jeeze.
Not entirely sure why, but we’ve experienced a serious mouse overpopulation problem in the barn this spring. A few mice, I don’t mind, but they are everywhere. I planned to stuff as many 5+ foot black snakes as I could find on the property into all the dark recesses of the barn, but I haven’t found any snakes (yet!) this season.
Soooo, I did a little research. Some people swear by the high(er) technology electronic traps that zap and immediately dispatch the mice, so I found a higher rated model on Amazon and ordered two at about $40 a pop. Just for grins, I also bought one of those “walk the plank” traps.
After about 2 days of evaluation, I pulled the two electronic traps out of the barn and put them in the basement. If they catch one mouse each per month, I’ll be happy. As demonstrated in this video, I don’t really like their design, and will be writing a critical product review on Amazon soon.
Now, the WTP trap is simply amazing in terms of effectiveness. The single plank trap in the barn caught 16 mice in one day! I think poor Hunter is getting tired of dispatching mice. That might be a good thing, because she’s been hunting mice in and around the barn all day, every day, for about 2 months now. Drives me nuts. She’s constantly under foot … chasing some prick mouse. Knocked me off my feet once. Tripped over her twice. THAT’s why the mice have to GO!
We’re dispatching the mice in the same general spot, and the local hawks, ravens, and turkey vultures have seemingly locked in a GPS waypoint, because they’re cleaning up all the mice out of the field.
I call that a win-win-win-win-win. Everybody (chickens, Hunter, me, local birds of prey, …) wins, except the mice. But, that’s what they get for being such vermin. 😉
2018.05.08 UPDATE …
See … I try to give the mice a sporting chance to survive.
I need the dumper trailer for another project today (rock harvesting in the gardens), and it was full of wood chips from last week’s wood chipper run … so I got off my duff and built a wood chip kiln prototype.
It’s a rough design (conceptual, proof-of-concept if you will …) but it should get the job done for this load of chips.
As described in the video, I opted to use a survivalist technique to collect the water that evaporates out of the wood. That’s one (of many!) reasons every bug out kit should include a few large trash bags. Water reclamation.
The other day I found a sneaky, covert, unauthorized, piratenest of chicken eggs secreted in a compost bin adjacent to the garden pasture coop. Last night, when I went to lock up the coop, I found a hen missing. Sure enough, she was sitting on the clutch of eggs, and gave me that “piss off!” look … so I crossed my fingers and let her stay outside the coop all night.
No surprise … we heard coyotes howling around the property all night. I made the silent commitment … if she survives the night, I’ll build a night-time cover for the compost bin and let her continue brooding for the next 3 weeks, just to see if she can actually hatch a few chicks ‘au naturel.’
And check out the abject ‘stink eye‘ she gives me when I got the camera too close … basically daring me to try to pick her up off the nest. No way! I’ve seen that look before. That little dinosaur brain of hers has gone primitive!
2018.05.05 / 5:00P UPDATE …
Almost forgot! I had to sling about 600 pounds of Black Kow manure in the barn pasture then rake it in with the drag harrow. Warm and humid today, so I was hot, tired and drenched in sweat, ready to call it a day, when Hooey said “Ahem … compost nest coyote proofing … remember?” Doah!
Not the prettiest thing I’ve ever built. Ran out of metal fabric half way through and had to switch to chicken wire, but I used rough sawed cedar and color matched it to the damn compost bin … so I should at LEAST get partial credit for that!
That bird is single minded now. Mother nature at her best. I’ll be VERY curious to see what she does if/when some chicks hatch.
There’s actually an interesting back story here, but now’s not the time.
Two days ago, while running the drag harrow over the SHTF “contingency garden” plot, I had a shackle on the pole boom implement behind the tractor come apart and fall off. I found the shackle just sitting on top of the dirt, but the clevis pin was MIA.
Sometimes, little shit like that drives me nuts. While I could have just jumped on Amazon.com and bought a new shackle, I instead decided to dust off the metal detector and find the damn pin.
Well over 10,000 sq.ft. to search! That is challenging enough, but even MORE challenging was the volume of other metal objects I was discovering in the dirt. Numerous old, antique things. Horseshoes, plow blades, bridle hardware, old handmade nails, etc.
THANKFULLY, I just found the clevis pin, about 30% through my search area. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was pretty close to where I found the shackle. However, I assumed the pin could have gotten hung up in the drag harrow and towed just about anywhere in the plot.
This was, essentially, a positive thinking exercise for me. Not going to get into the woo-woo B.S. here, but there’s really something to be said for getting positive and staying positive.
