Wild and Terrible

Me with one of the many giant puffball mushrooms we have been foraging and selling at the Oberlin Farmers' Market. This one weighed 4.5 lbs. A heavenly autumn treat that appears out of nowhere on lawns and in the woods, the giant puffball has marshmallow-soft pure white flesh. Cut into thick "steaks" and grilled or fried, it is an evanescent sublime gift of the earth.






And then one morning the great horned owl arrived...




When one of the farm's interns Rachel went to open our "chook dome," an Australian design for a portable chicken coop, she was shocked to find the lifeless bodies of half of the birds inside bloody and strewn about and the other half of the birds visibly stressed and anxious. It took her a few minutes, but the even bigger shock came when she noticed there inside the coop, still and silent, was the author of the carnage, a massive great horned owl about the size of a turkey. How the owl got in and why it was still there in the morning we still don't quite understand, as the coop had been shut up tight, and clearly the owl didn't know how to get out once it got in.The stuff of horror movies, imagine being one of the surviving chickens having to pass the night in the confines of the coop with the serial killer that just dispatched half of your sisters.





Raising animals has been a new experience for me this year, and I have a real fondness for our Golden Buff chickens. One of my cats at home, Genji, makes little clucking sounds, so we call him "chicken," and over the course of the year that affection has flowed back to the chickens at the farm. Opening up their coop in the morning, putting them to bed at night, I have come to call them by one of the other nicknames of our cats,"baachis" -- "daughters" in Urdu --and pick them up and stroke their soft feathers. We have had a number of predator incidents this year. Down from 40 birds to 14, the victims of racoons, hawks, and now an owl. It is not easy each time we lose a "baachi" but at the same time there is a wild beauty in the penetrating stare of that owl and a deep recognition that everything must eat and be eaten in turn.