An opossum in the chicken house

The calendar says yesterday was January 3, 2009, but the thermometer showed that the high was 73 degrees. Here where we live that is not normal. But sometimes not normal can seem pretty nice.

What a beautiful day we had! The sky was bright and clear most all day. True the wind blew hard but not too hard.

Our son-in-law brought two of our granddaughters out to the country to play. They rode in the wagon, swung on the swings, went down the slide, and marveled at how far the wind blew the soap bubbles their Daddy was making.

When I was putting the chicken feed I had just brought from town into the storage bin the little girls and their Daddy came out to see the chickens. They checked the nest boxes and found six fresh brown eggs. They clucked at the chickens inside the pen, the littlest girl toddling and the bigger girl running along the fence.

They stopped short when they saw the opossum.

One evening a couple weeks ago, I had been late getting out to close up the hen house. When I got out there the birds were all out in the run. That was weird so I knew something was wrong. Inside, in the back corner, sat Ms. Opossum enjoying a fresh egg. I dispatched her with my .22 and tossed her over the fence without ceremony. She landed in some tall grass. The birds spent that night out in the run, too spooked to go in the house. By the next evening they had forgotten about the intruder and settled on the roost as usual.

Well, I had pretty much forgotten about the dead critter; guess I figured something would have dragged it off. But no! There it was in all its grizzly splendor. Actually, it was well preserved as we had been having “regular” cold weather.

By this time, Grandma had joined us out at the chicken house. She quickly got the little girls away from the opossum and interested in something else. I went to the barn and got a shovel.

Of course, I dug the hole in which to plant the erstwhile chicken house raider in the chicken run. I was pleasantly surprised to find absolutely no frost in the ground. Not only was it not frozen, there were large wiggly earth worms living and working in the top eight inched of it.

The chicken run is part of the garden spot we have been using for many years except when we quit using it because of the deer. You can read about that in an earlier post. The ground is quite fertile so I would expect to find worms there in the warmer months. I was surprised to find them in January.

The take away point of this for gardeners is that ground left mostly bare in the winter months, like a chicken run, will warm more quickly than mulched ground. I’ll bet if I had tried to dig in other parts of the garden where there is still a thick cover of mulch, I would have found the ground frozen.

It sure is fun to live and learn in the country.