2 AM on the Farm: What Actually Keeps Predators Away (And It’s NOT Me in Clogs)

There I was, in a screenshot of grainy door camera footage – wearing only a t-shirt and clogs and what looked like a glowing, white diaper – outside the front door of our barndominium – illuminated by the motion-triggered flood lights (that can be seen from space) – surrounded by the pitch darkness of 2 am – in our family group chat.

This image was preceded in the chat by a screenshot of the immediately earlier footage of the opossum I was chasing.

(I will not be inserting the photo of me so don’t ask…)

For the record, I never caught the opossum. That was lucky. Charging into the dark pantless and unarmed makes me feel like I’m doing something, but I am completely unprepared for battle.

This is what happens when a high-strung, light sleeper moves to a farm. The group chat humiliation was a one time event; however, the nighttime shenanigans are a regular occurrence.

We’ve been here long enough that I should be used to the things that go bump in the night, but I’m not. Out here the nights are full of sounds that are very different than the urban ones I grew up with. We hear owls and coyotes, the dogs bark, the donkeys bray, the cows make a loud, troubling sound that isn’t really what I would call a moo.

Aside: The Roosters

We also have roosters crowing at all times. I don’t know if it’s our lights (have I mentioned the lights) or just what roosters do, but they crow whenever they feel like it – not just at dawn as the idioms would have you believe. And if one rooster starts many others follow. In fact, one of the most vocal roosters is a neighbor’s rooster who adopted us (we call him Marshmallow) and roosts on the back porch. Right. Outside. My. Window.

The roosters often wake me up – I can’t ignore them – but I almost never run outside scantily clad to check on them. I usually just lie there and wonder what on earth they are crowing about. The best is when juvenile roosters first start crowing – they do it all wrong and it’s hilarious. We had one rooster, Spinach, who could not figure out how to make a cock-a-doodle-doo. His was more like Dolly Parton singing Jo-LEE-ee-ene. But I digress…

So why is there photographic evidence of me out there running around practically starkers in the middle of the night? Predators. They are real. They want to eat the animals that we love, care for and invest in.

We have tried many things to keep our animals safe. One of our first attempts was adopting Elvis from our neighbor. He was living alone in a small paddock because they had been downsizing and he was the last animal left on their farm. An old, intact, male donkey that had been in the family for decades is not easy to rehome. But he was lonely and they asked if we would take him. Donkeys are known for being work animals – carrying loads, pulling carts, etc, but they are also guardian animals. Elvis had apparently killed a coyote once in his younger years. Perfect! We brought him home.

Elvis settled in with us quickly and is an absolute attention hog with people, but he could not care less about cows. They were not company for him. We tried getting him a horse. They were frenemies – lots of biting and light kicking, and total freak outs if they couldn’t see each other. I thought (in my non-farmer brain) that Elvis needed a girlfriend. I talked about it (the way wives do) until it happened. We found Janice (Joplin) at an auction with a baby girl (Debbie Harry), by her side. It was the same auction where Ace bought the goats.

Well, Janice was a bit skittish and Debbie was too young to be put in a paddock with Elvis, so Elvis had to get to know them across a few fences. That was not popular with Elvis at all, but hey, at least we had a guardian to stay with our baby goats! That’s what we thought until the screaming started.

In the middle of the night Ace and I jumped out of bed because the goats were losing their minds. We went running outside to see Elvis running around the pasture holding the back of Spicy Goat’s neck in his mouth. We were shocked! Ace stormed in there, barefoot and wearing only jeans, scolding Elvis loudly and quickly rescued the goat.

Elvis is much happier now that he is with Janice and Debbie (has fathered several foals and has since been ‘fixed’) and he has never gone after the goats again. But clearly that wasn’t a reliable security system. (Lesson learned: when people recommend a livestock guardian donkey, they usually mean a gelding or a jenny. An old, intact male donkey in with baby goats was not the perfect plan I thought it was.) With the donkeys in the pasture, the calves were safe, but we were regularly losing guineas and chickens.

So we tried cameras with motion sensitive alerts – hence the mortifying diaper pic described above. The number of false alarms exponentially exceeded the actual predators, and I was exhausted. In the end, we developed a layered system – two livestock guardian dogs (Samson and Moses), motion sensitive flood lights, the cameras, and the donkeys (all five of them) – and our predator problems are much less frequent.

Here’s how the work is divided. Samson and Moses stay on the bird and goat side of the fence, where they chase off owls, hawks, weasels, raccoons and the occasional skunk (gross). Opossums were assigned to Samson and Moses, unanimously, by the family group chat. They also have access to the Highland ladies. Moses loves the cows; Samson prefers the goats. The donkeys handle the big pasture with the horses and the rest of the cows.

So with two guardian dogs, five donkeys who (mostly) behave, and floodlights visible from space, do I sleep through the night? Not even close. I’m still the woman who bolts for the door in her clogs, but a lot less often. Every morning I count heads, and everybody’s there. I’ll take the glowing diaper over a pile of feathers any day.