Pros and Cons of Chicken Litter

Things that I have learned from using chicken litter as an relatively inexpensive organic fertilizer for our food plots:

1.       It smells

2.       It continues to smell for a long time, especially if there is no rain

3.       When it is spread by a truck it doesn’t just land on the field; sometimes it lands on nearby trees.

4.       Flies arrive with the litter.

5.       It clings to boots and tractor tires.  Then they smell, too.

All of this can be accepted if the litter works as a good organic fertilizer.  But how can we tell?  It still smells.  Perhaps, due to a serious drought, that is the only evidence we will have this deer season.

Truck Delivering Chicken Litter

 

Fox with 3 Kits Make a Home Under Our Storage Building

We were surprised and thrilled to discover that a beautiful gray fox has made a den under our storage building.  Just this week she let her three kits out to play while we sat silently on the porch.

Notice that one of the kits is climbing a tree.  Gray foxes are unique as one of the only canids that climb trees.

Screech Owlets have arrived!

We were eager to see if the Screech Owl's eggs had hatched, so we silently approach the wood duck box and gingerly opened it.  Two adorable screech owlets were sleeping with Mom in the corner, who was also napping.

Screech Owlets

Mouse Dinner

And in the other corner Mom had provided a tasty meal for dinner - a freshly caught mouse.  Unfortunately one owlet didn't survive and has been placed in the corner behind the mouse.

Porch is the Battlefield: Mom Bird 2, Bill 0

We enjoy sitting out on our porch which is covered by the roof and from which a light fixture hangs.  This is an ideal place to sit anytime, especially on a rainy day, because it is covered and stays dry and is shady.  Unfortunately, a bird has also decided that it is the perfect place to build her nest.

Several years ago she built it inside the light fixture.  The porch floor was a mess, because, in order to keep her nest clean, she sat on the edge of the light fixture and used the floor as a target for the bird poop.  Finally Bill dragged a tall ladder onto the porch and wrapped wire all around the lamp in order to encourage Mom Bird to build her next nest somewhere else.

Birds sitting in nest build by Mom Bird after the wire was wrapped around the light fixture

Evidently Mom Bird liked this added protection for her nest and next set of babies.  Soon a new family found the light fixture with the wire a neat place to live.  And the wire had the added advantage of providing the perfect ledge to sit on and observe the surroundings, as well as to continue to use the floor as a target for the bird poop.

After these baby birds finally grew up and flew the nest, Bill decided that more drastic measures needed to be taken.  More wire was bought and aluminum foil was added to the mix:

New nest build by Mom Bird on rafter next to light wrapped with wire and foil

We thought that surely Mom Bird would give up and find somewhere else to build her next nest.  So were we surprised when, after a short absence, we were greeted with lots of mud on the floor of our porch and a new nest on the rafter next to the light and positioned right over our table, which I am sure will be the new target.

The battle continues, but so far the score is Mom Bird 2, Bill 0.
  

Spring is Back and So Is the Owl

Finally - Spring has arrived.  The pear and plum trees are in bloom.  Hopefully the apple trees will soon awaken after a fairly cold winter.  And our screech owl has returned to the wood duck box.

Each Spring we eagerly sneak up to this beautiful cedar nesting box and quietly open the side door and peer inside to see if a wood duck has found a new home.  And each Spring we find instead an adorable little screech owl that has taken up residence with plans to raise her owlets in the plush surroundings, recently filled by us with fresh cedar shavings.

Screech Owl with Eggs in Wood Duck Box

For More Wildlife Sightings Consider a Golf Cart

If you want to see more wildlife on your hunting property forget the ATV or MULE.  What you really need is a golf cart.  Slow and quiet beats fast and loud if you want to fit into the surroundings and not announce your approach.  We recently invested in a vintage golf cart that rolls along at a slow but steady pace and is so quiet that we can’t even hear ourselves coming.  We got it to help get around the property while nursing a healing knee but were surprised at an unexpected result.  We actually started seeing wildlife again!

When we first bought our property we often would get glances of wildlife, but after a few years we noticed that we hardly ever jumped a deer or spotted a rabbit or turkey, even though the cameras around the property proved that the wildlife was still around.  The first day that we used the cart to get close to a favorite spot for hunting turkeys, we saw a deer browsing in an open field.  It looked up at us and just stared, not sure about this odd creature.  We stopped, it stopped, and for a few minutes we enjoyed a beautiful sight of a deer at sunrise enjoying fresh greens. Later that morning we called in a turkey, and, although it was a hen, it was a thrilling duet of fake and real turkey chatter.  Later we even called in a turkey hunter, whose face I am sure was very red beneath his camouflage mask.

But the most amazing experience happened later that same morning when we moved, stealthily, in our cart along a fire trail and then slowly started walking toward a new hunting spot.  We spotted two deer in the open field next to us, they spotted us, we froze, they froze, and then they slowly walked toward us to check us out.  To them we must have seemed like ghosts, just materializing out of thin air.  The encounter didn’t last long, but it will last in my memory for a long time.

Graft Sexcess!

Since we know that deer like the persimmon fruit, we have been watchful for any female persimmon trees on our property.  What we have discovered is that, while we have many persimmon trees, most of them are male and so do not produce any fruit.  An article in the QDMA magazine Quality Whitetails from June-July 2011, Grafting Persimmons, by David A. Osborn and Dr. Karl V. Miller, recommended a remedy to this situation.  The article provides detailed instructions on how to graft a small branch with several buds from a producing female persimmon tree on to a male tree or a young persimmon tree that has not produced any fruit yet.  The result would be a hybrid tree producing fruit.  This was definitely worth a try!

We have several prolific female persimmon trees, so we carefully followed the directions on 9 healthy young persimmon trees of unknown sex, using scion wood cut and stored during the winter from one of these prolific females.

Prolific Persimmon Tree

We were hesitant of sexcess; however, months later, we were thrilled to see that the process was sexcessful on 3 of the 9 trees.  After rereading the instructions (always a good idea) we discovered that we should have cut the foliage below the graft in order for the scion to receive most of the energy from the roots.  Possibly the other 6, all of which had a great deal of foliage beneath the graft, would have been sexcessful, too.

Sexcessful Graft