Game Cam

Our neighbor loaned us his game camera so I could set it up by the pond because I've been seeing interesting tracks in the sand, what looked like coyote, fox, of course deer and one that I think was from a fisher.

Right away we could see crows on the camera. Every day all through out the day crows come down to the water to drink. Pretty much every hour.

Then it was exciting to see something bigger than a bunch of birds when we saw these deer, a fawn and doe who regularly return for a drink.

Check out how their eyes reflect into the water from the flash on the camera. I never would have thought that would happen. Kind of neat looking.

Soon the doe and fawn were showing up in the daylight.

We wonder if this is the same fawn that we saw laying by our green house a while back.

But, then the other day I checked the camera and finally saw something other than crows and deer. Check out this long legged coyote in the pictures below.


I wouldn't be surprised if this fella got in on the big slaughter of chickens and turkeys we had last year. Probably how he got so tall eating all that prime meat!

In two weeks we get our livestock guardian dog. I finally settled on a breed. It's going to be a Kangal Dog a breed originating from Turkey.

The picture at the right is what they look like in their native country. In Turkey they typically crop their ears and it is said that when one of these dogs kills a wolf it has then earned the right to wear a spiked collar. The harsh conditions of the Turkish countryside developed in the breed a rugged hardiness and a strong livestock guardian instinct.

With all the predators we have here coyote, wolf, bear, and the rare but, sometimes seen cougar, not to mention roaming dogs, that would prey on sheep and lambs, I feel that we need a dog of sufficient stature to protect our animals.

In America the ears of the dogs are not cropped as seen in the left hand photo. We are getting

a female so that we can breed it and get more Kangal Dogs. I've wanted to breed dogs my whole life and I figure I'm not getting any younger so I'm going to try my hand at breeding these Lord willing.

Many years ago I had acquired a female Brazilian hunting dog called a Fila Brasiliero, but she got hit by a car before I could breed her. As with any animal you never know what can happen that might sideline your plans.

But, I am quite taken with this breed and am eager to give it a try.

The pictures of these dogs were obtained from the Kangal Dog Club of America website.

I plan to write more about my search for a livestock guardian dog at a future date as things unfold. Don't want to jump the gun and say too much off hand since plans are often so easily changed.

Still getting plenty of rain here. We were going to get the rest of our hay today but, we decided we'd better wait until Friday as the forecast shows sunny sky's for then. The farmers were nice enough to put the hay wagon with our 100 bales of hay on it in the barn waiting for us until we can get it.

My garbage week is all messed up this week because of the 4th of July. Normally we pick up garbage a day late after the holidays but, this year the 4th came on a Sunday. I called the landfill and they were going to be open Monday and I looked at a couple different calenders to see if they said anything about Monday being an observed holiday and found nothing, so we decided to run and not skip a day. Well, most people had their garbage out but, a significant number of them did not. So alot of our Monday customers called us today wondering why we didn't pick them up today, Tuesday. So I basically ran our route twice, going around picking up the ones who thought we were going to be a day late.

After going through that I figure tomorrow we need to take the day off, that way the rest of the week will meet the rest of the customers expectations. We considered it but, after investigating we just didn't give a thought to Monday being a holiday. But, I sure heard it today. People were saying " But Monday was a holiday!!!" Ok, Ok I get it now! Hence taking tomorrow off. The longer we do this garbage business the more I don't like holidays. People have such a hard time remembering what the deal is, are we picking up or aren't we. This time we messed it up ourselves. Oh well. You gotta be able to laugh at yourself otherwise it just isn't worth it.

We've been picking up garbage for almost 10 years now. Never dreamed in a thousand years I would have been doing that before we got into this. But, it has taught us a lot and has been providing us with steady income. We are currently working on two new ways to make money besides picking up garbage and besides farm income. We see it as kind of an off shoot from the farm income but, it isn't anything we produce ourselves. It has potential to produce a decent income. This too I'll be posting about at a later date.

Well, this is a bigger post than I've been doing lately and there are other matters pressing so I need to sign off here.

Until Next Time