Living with Wildlife

1/30/2017

Last year when I casually told my sister in Texas about the mountain lions and bears and other wildlife we live among, she laughed at me at said it sounded made up. Those in northern Idaho know we have an abundance of wildlife. We love having them around us, even the predators. It's an amazing place to live. At the same time, it presents problems to homesteading and farming.

Naturally, predators can kill your animals just as they may anywhere else. Still, we have a lot of them to content with. We have a resident pack of wolves to the east of us which regularly has young lone wolves that leave the pack. Even though they have been spotted on neighboring property, we have had no problems from the lone wolves.

Coyotes are all around us. They live all over, but the mountain coyotes in our area are the largest type and they often form up into packs. They are also exceptionally noisy. We find them to be like hyenas with how noisy and social they are, especially at night. We haven't had them kill anything, but they have been very close to our livestock. They drive our guardian dogs crazy most nights.

We also have wild cats including bobcats and mountain lions. We have had problems with the lions, which I will elaborate on in another post. Pound for pound, they are the strongest cat in the world, so they are a serious force to contend with. We also have bears that frequent our forest scratching up the trees and tearing things up. We leave the forest for the wildlife, so that works out well. They can be especially bad in the spring after waking up from hibernation and in the fall as they go crazy getting ready to sleep for the winter. They will raid bees, eat all the fruit out of the trees, and pilfer.

Birds of prey and crows can also be a problem for lambs and cats. Owls will disappear cats without warning. Hawks around here are large enough to take cats, small dogs, and wipe out a flock of chickens. The crows, however, are the ones I really keep an eye on because they will kill weak or newborn lambs. I haven't had problems with kids, which are more vigorous.

Non-predators can also be damaging, but are fun to see. One unseen risk is that they can pass diseases to our animals. We employ regular vaccination schedule to combat this. We usually have eight or more white-tailed deer come to water in our ponds every evening. We see the does with the fawns in the spring and even notice they form up groups where one doe seems to baby sit the fawns of other does. They could, however, clean out our strawberry patch and wipe out our trees. We put up fencing around that section.

The elk seem to be a much stronger presence than deer. They form up large herds in the fall. Our neighbor recorded a large herd on their acreage once and we stopped counting individual elk at 300, and that seemed like only about half of them. Usually they travel in groups of a dozen to about forty or fifty. The cows hide their calves in our forest during the day while they graze. If scared and running, elk can tear down fences and scare livestock. We've specially designed our fence to remain in place in case this happens. It doesn't help that our property is a traditional site of elk bull fights. Even though we've put in pastures, in the fall large males will face off and push each other around. They destroy immature trees and throw each other into the fences.

We have been surprised at the boldness of the elk. When we first started working the property, we brought a cooler full of drinks for while we worked. The elk opened the cooler and removed all of the drinks and removed all of the labels from the drinks. They do things like this all the time. Come January, they are also getting quite hungry and have no problem eating hay put out for livestock. They will also go into barns and eat their fill. Our neighbors have lost two tons of sheltered hay to elk in one night, and then they come back for more!

We also have two or three flocks of turkeys that converge into a large flock and meander around our property every evening. We've had a moose pass by without stopping. Smaller animals abound, too, including all sorts of ducks (we love it when they raise their ducklings in our ponds), skunks (love to raid beehives), raccoons, and rodents galore.

For those who aren't familiar with our area, it's hard to fully understand the diversity and quantity of wildlife. We try to live in harmony with wildlife and love to have them visit our farm.