"There's a coon in that log and I ain't got no dog!"

Installment #23 of Nine Years at Panther's Hollow

Photo by Joshua J. Cotten on Unsplash

Those are the lyrics to an old-time Appalachian song that I always found distasteful. But during my stay at Panther’s Hollow I often shared the author’s sentiment.

I’ve mentioned that in my efforts to raise chickens I had a lot of trouble with predators. That was partly because it took me a while to learn all the ways a critter could get into some enclosure that I thought was secure, or manage to get its occupants out in some gruesome fashion.

First, I naively supposed that I could leave the crank-operated windows on the camper open a couple of inches for ventilation, and anything small enough to get in wouldn’t be large enough to kill a chicken. Wrong. When my first chicken flock was about half grown, one morning I noticed some feathers under one of the windows. At that point I had never bothered to count my chickens, since I wasn’t letting them out yet. I looked around and realized to my dismay that four of the sixteen were missing!