Kidding-Season Tragedy

Reader Contribution by Maggie Bonham
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As usual, everything is last minute when it comes to preparing. That’s usually because I’m so darn busy doing everything else that by the time I’m thinking about the kids, I’ve realize that the pen I had the does kid in last season is housing waterfowl because a skunk killed three ducks and my best goose. My husband moved the waterfowl in that pen while we planned to live-trap the skunk.

The trapping never happened because to top everything else off, we had three feet of snow in the last snow event that lasted about a week. Then, the weather warmed up where we were seeing 40s and 50s. That has made for some very unstable snow and a terrible mess. Everything around my place is mud and the snow ripped the woodstove chimney off my barn. We got off lucky, however. We’ve had several avalanches in my area including the one that tore through a house in Missoula.

The only pen my husband and I could seriously consider using as a kid pen was the tom turkey pen. So, we butchered one tom and moved the other two with the young turkey hens today. My husband had fed the critters in the morning and I checked on the girls in the afternoon. Everyone looked ready to pop, but no one really showed signs of it. I had fed the critters the night before and noted that one of my Boer mix girls, named Blaze, laid down and looked a bit uncomfortable. I checked her and made note that she wasn’t showing signs of labor so I just decided to keep an eye on her.

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