The Big Yard: Notes from a Pajama Birdwatcher

February 13, 2022

At first light, I free the chickens from their locked roosting box, but they just stare at me from their perch, hesitant to enter the larger coop.  “Fine,” I say.  “Stay there and lay some eggs.”

Egg production has dropped to zero since last week’s 3 AM encounter with a hooded skunk.  Their screams shot me out of bed and into a subfreezing backyard, barefoot and shirtless—one time I should have worn pajamas to bed.  At my own screams, the skunk departed, trailing the white plume of its tail.

I can’t blame the girls for their henopause (yes, a real word).  For the first time in twelve years of raising chickens in this canyon, a skunk pulled one of them from the roost and killed her.  I found her frozen to the ground in the morning, headless and splayed open as if spatchcocked and ready for the grill.

Since then, the girls get locked into their nest boxes every night.

But today, something is up.  The hens cluck nervously.  When I look behind the coop after feeding Bunny Stew, the rabbit, I notice the door on the skunk trap is shut and something is inside.  Guess I’m making the drive to the river, I think, walking around the coop to the occupied Havahart.  But the trap holds something else, something with soft dark eyes.  A gray fox.

“Maybe it wasn’t a skunk that ate our chicken,” the wife says when I show her a photo on my phone, “but you can’t trap every fox.  They belong in the canyon.”

Last year, I caught 41 skunks in the yard and drove them off the mountain, even as far as the San Pedro River, 13 miles away.  I’m sure most made their way home and back under our house.

“I’ll let it go,” I assure her.

Later, I drive to the river (without the fox) and park at the skunk-release spot.  The day is warm and clear, the sky as blue as a lazuli bunting.  I have birds on my mind—one in particular, a rarity I’ve seen here before but no one has reported recently.

I’m in luck. A couple hundred yards upstream, the Louisiana waterthrush twerks as it searches for invertebrates among the bleached and broken limbs of a logjam.