Late in the afternoon one Sunday last April, a black pickup truck pulled onto the farm’s driveway just as I was leaving the barn. A man, looking to be in his early thirties, was at the wheel. He leaned out of the window and called to me, “This your farm?”
“Yup. Can I help you?”
“I saw you have sheep. There are a lot of coyotes around here and I was wondering if you’d want me to shoot some of them for you.”
“Thanks. But we get along just fine with our coyotes.”
He looked at me the way people look at you when we say things like that – ‘this guy is either an idiot or some kind of liberal.’ He was at least partly correct.
“Really. We graze our sheep during the day and bring them into the barnyard at night, when the coyotes are hunting. The coyotes take care of the rats and voles, so we don’t have a rat problem in our barn.”
“That makes sense,” he agreed.
“It’s only failed once, when the pups were just out of their dens, and I forgot to turn on the fence charger,” I said. “I know they were pups, because they bit a few sheep but they didn’t kill any, even though one was nearly 10 years old, and blind in one eye. They were amateurs.” The would-be hunter wished me the best of luck and drove off.
More ominous perhaps, a couple of weeks ago my neighbor, whose land borders our eastern-most pasture, rang our doorbell to let us know that he’d seen a fisher-cat at the top of his field, near our pasture. Fishers, sometimes called fisher-cats, are not cats at all. They are in the weasel family and are closely related to badgers, martens and wolverines. They are ferocious predators that will readily attack small animals, like chickens, small dogs and cats … and lambs!
During the 19th and early 20th centuries, fishers were prized for their fur. They were trapped almost to extinction in their natural range: Canada, and the northern United States. In fact, they were considered extinct in New York and Massachusetts. But in the late 20th and early 21st centuries they began making a comeback. When, sometime around 2005, Roland Kayes, an ecologist who for many years studied mammals at the New York State Museum, announced that fishers had been spotted in Albany County, my conservationist colleagues were elated. My response was more complicated.
As an ecologist and staunch advocate of conservation, I am always pleased to learn about the recovery of our native biodiversity – our nation’s wild legacy. As a farmer, well, maybe not so much…especially when that biodiversity eats my livestock. I admit it: I’m a conservation NIMBY. I’m all in favor of restoring predator populations – wolves, badgers, fishers. But not in my backyard. It’s not so much that I’m against carnivores predating livestock. After all, predators need to feed their families too. It’s not that I resent their killing my lambs – most of our lambs will be slaughtered for food. Nor is it about losing income. Our grass-fed, grass-finished lambs contribute little to the farm’s profitability. It’s really about something more personal. It’s about my relationship to the animals in my care; the animals to which I have a responsibility. My job is to make their lives happy, to keep them healthy and to ensure their safety. In return they provide food, fiber, and fertility to our soil. When I lose an animal, for whatever reason, I have failed my flock. I have failed to do my job as a farmer. That is the worst feeling a farmer can have. To fail is devastating.
Soon I’ll be moving the sheep to the East Pasture, on the other side of the hedgerow, where I can’t see them during a casual walk to the barn. I am struggling with the question of how much of the East Pasture to graze. Do I bring the flock to the part of the pasture near where my neighbor saw the predator? Or do I simply brush hog the paddocks adjacent to my neighbor’s land? How much danger do I expose the lambs to in order to support the ecosystem services that regenerative agriculture provides to our soils and plants?
For now, I’m learning all I can about fisher ecology and behavior. Where do they den? How many kits are born? When do the kits leave the den? Do the young stay in the area, or do they move away?
I’ll also make sure the electrical fence is really “hot.” I’ll check on the flock frequently and bring the animals back to the barnyard well before sunset. After that, the predators can own the pasture. Ultimately, I hope that when some guy pulls onto my driveway and offers to kill fishers, I’ll be able to say, “Thanks, but that’s not necessary. We get along just fine with our fishers.”