Apocalyptic Homesteading (Day 572)

almost 2 years ago

Hello Everyone!

Avoiding the news overload, Finding another dead bird, Lots of large cat prints & I miss the foxes barking!

I am off to a slow start this morning but at least I got up rather early and did not sleep in all that long after sunrise. After making some espresso and opening the text editor I pretty much just zoned out reading stuff on Hive and avoiding a rather nagging impulse to look at the news.

That last bit is pretty odd honestly because it has been quite some time since I felt the compulsion to look at the news first thing in the morning. Most likely that feeling/compulsion is the direct result of looking at too much of the stuff the last few evenings.

Which as a side note is something I will now be doing less of because yeah I really dislike having that as one of my first inclinations of the day! Having gone the better part of the last six weeks without feeling that urge (especially first thing in the morning) I think that I am going to take a step back from it now before it can regain a foothold in my daily routines.

There is assuredly many things well worth paying attention to during these times but how the heck to do that without getting overloaded in the process, be able to learn something meaningful and not get hooked by the folks pushing the content is difficult at best to say the least. If there was a 'silver bullet' remedy on how to achieve that I would absolutely employ it but alas all I can do is shrink the attention that I pay it way down and redirect it elsewhere.

Now that my interest in gaming is beginning to wane again I cannot direct it there (which yeah made that six week period that I mentioned possible) so I am sort of back to where I started as far as hobbies go and what I spend my time on. I am also back to not really having a social life once I fully stop gaming but that is a different topic altogether.

Alright, I just got back from taking a hike just before things began to heat up outside and whoa I once again have to note how dry everything is. Aside from that little shower that occurred the other day it still has yet to rain even though there has been several times where the sky grew dark and it began to rumble with thunder. I doubt that it will happen but whoa I sure hope it rains before that insanely hot heatwave starts up the day after tomorrow!

Anyway, while I was hiking I found a set of bird wings very close to where I saw that single wing the other week so now I am super curious as to what is killing the birds around here. This time it looks like a hawk of some kind was killed (or perhaps just died naturally) and the place where I found it has some rather hard-packed soil so I could not see if there were any prints left nearby.

A little further down the road from there (perhaps five or six meters away) I did see what looked like large cat prints in some sand. Since there was a mess of other tracks there as well as tire tracks I am really unsure of exactly what kind of prints they were but made a mental note to refresh my memory on bobcat tracks in particular.

Some time back (I think it was late winter or early spring) there was that incident where I heard what sounded like a fox and a bobcat tangling in the woods and since I keep finding the bird wings near that area I am inclined to think that may well be what it is. To be clear here I am not ruling out other possibilities but my 'hunch' is that a bobcat has moved into the area perhaps even into one (or more) of the numerous nearby fox dens.

Okay, it is now much later in the day and after refreshing my memory on bobcat tracks I hiked back to that area that I previously mentioned and gave everything a good looking over. Granted there were a lot of tracks in that area and I am absolutely open to being wrong... but it definitely looks like there is at least one big cat that has been through there (what looks like numerous times) and a bunch of smaller prints that are either from a single cub or multiple ones.

There was also fox and coyote prints there (as well as domestic dog prints) so I spent some time looking at some of the other sandy areas near there as well just to try finding some better prints. My search was not disappointing and I wound up finding the same large and small cat prints so I am inclined to think (from the sheer volume of them) that one or more cats are frequenting that area on a somewhat routine basis.

I have some rather mixed feelings about having big cats moving into the area because of the chickens but all that I can really do is make sure that I do not forget to close the chicken coop door at night. Which is something that I am surprisingly bad at remembering because I often head indoors before the sun has fully set and the chickens have begun roosting for the evening.

All in all there being one or more big cats nearby may explain why I have not heard any foxes in quite some time now and although I would rather have the foxes around than the cats... that is nature!

Honestly, as long as they leave the chickens alone (like the foxes have) I will not go out of my way to scare them off. If they become problematic I may have to track down some dehydrated large cat urine (from a mountain lion or some other big cat) and start marking things with it to drive the smaller cats away.

Well, that is it for this entry. I hope that everyone is doing well and has a nice day/night.