A Mink Coat For Tricia?

A mink coat.  When I think of that, I think of wealth, luxury, affluence.  The other day I almost acquired a mink coat for Tricia.  Let me rewind and tell you the story.  The hens have been real nervous lately.  My wife theorized that something was terrorizing them.  A hawk?  An owl?  Possums?  I promptly set the trap and caught 3 possums in five days.  I thought the culprits were caught.  Good thing, because their numbers were diminishing.  We're missing a noticeable amount of hens.  But now, I thought I solved the problem.

However, on Thursday of last week, there were feathers all over the ground by the barn and the hens wouldn't even go out and eat when we fed them the hen scratch.  What in the world?  On Friday I got home and Russ had been out to the barn to collect the day's egg production.  As he was picking up eggs, he noticed a fracas in the pasture.

Or maybe not.  It appeared at first glance that a hen was taking a dust bath.  After looking more closely, SOMETHING had her.  Russ picked up a stick and ran out to rescue the hen.  He popped the predator but good, and it limped into the woods wounded.  Russ ran to the woods and caught up with the perpetrator and finished the job with a solid blow to the animal's head.

What was it?  A mink!

This vicious weasel-like creature is a little larger than a squirrel.  This one was reddish-brown in color with lighter markings on its tail and a white patch under its chin.

I was impressed that Russ was able to run after this hen-killer and catch it.  Russ was in the right place at the right time.  The mink was not!  His chicken-killin' days are done.  The hen gratefully was saved.  She was scared and visibly shaken, but she'll live to see another day, thanks to Russ.

Where there is one, there's bound to be more.  We will keep our eyes peeled for more mink mayhem.  For now, though, I think I have the beginnings of a mink coat for Tricia!

On second thought, it might be quite a while before we can kill another.  Tricia is petite, but I'd have to kill a bunch of these varmints to make a coat for her.  Perhaps I can skin the mink and make Tricia a fashionable mink fur lined mask for her to wear during the Covid craziness.  She'd be the talk of the town.  I'm gonna go out on a limb and say she'd never wear it.

The Winter Coat

I have a big Columbia camouflage coat that I wear when it gets cold.  It got down to 26 degrees the other day and I broke it out of the coat closet a lot earlier than I usually do.  It did the trick of keeping me nice and warm.  Oftentimes, I'm concerned about the animals when the cold weather kicks in, but mostly when it is cold AND wet.  I've always heard, animals can handle the cold and they can handle wet weather, but being cold and wet is a hard hill for them to climb.

Fortunately, God has created a mechanism in cattle that helps them out during winter.  They don't have to go to a coat closet - they GROW their coats.  They are all registered Jersey cows, and they don't do well in the summer.  In the summer, their coats are slick - not much hair at all.  However, when fall rolls around, their hair really starts growing.  Here is Clarabull.  You can tell he's a little "fuzzy." 

Luna doesn't grow a thick coat.  Clarabelle's coat comes in a little thicker.  Rosie is the cow that really puts a thick winter parka on!  Saturday morning after milking, I walked her out of the barn and was admiring the coat she was wearing.

Yeah, I'm talkin' about you, Rosie.  She always cocks one ear up and looks at us with that goofy look.  Rosie is the cow that likes to lay in the mud like a pig all summer to stay cool.   Now in the winter, she grows a big furry coat to keep herself comfortable.

I took a close-up of 'ol Rosie's belly so you can see just how thick her hair grows around this time every year.  When we are milking her in the barn, we're freezing cold, but it doesn't bother her at all.  You can feel how warm she is.

She grows a lot of hair on her udder, too, though, and sometimes we'll get out the clippers and shave her udder as long hair on her udder can get in the way when you are trying to milk her.  The long hair they grow helps them to stay warm during the winter, but come summertime, they'll shed the winter coat they worked so hard to grow.  It's a neat cycle that God orchestrated.