I’m heading out today to attend part of the Taos Wool Festival. I’m taking my second revision of a Monmouth cap, plus the start of a scarf from a chart that I’m having issues with, in hopes that I can get some help from friends there. Some of my knitting friends will fortunately be attending.
The Monmouth cap is interesting. My first one followed the many online patterns fairly well, but when it was done, it didn’t look quite right. While it’s a very nice knit cap, it doesn’t look at all like the one in the Nelson Museum. So, I started another of my own design, but I’m stuck on the double-knitting part for the brim. I think I have a good plan to finish it, but I want to run it by someone else first.
About a week ago, we had bears visit us, and they were very close to the house. I keep meaning to put up pictures of the tracks, but didn’t get around to it until today. There were at least two, with one larger and one smaller. The first track was very close to the house, as you can see. It was fresh. We backtracked and found fresh scat, too.
Bears can be very serious predators of sheep. They will go into a killing frenzy, slaughtering them without eating any. So far, our guard dogs have managed to keep them at bay, but I’m anxious to get the bears off the mesa and into hibernation.
The next morning, we found even more tracks next to the house – right by the porch this time.
There’s a huge overpopulation of bears here. When Colorado got rid of their spring bear hunt, we started having many more problem bears. They came into populated areas and started to learn about domestic livestock as food animals. We’re allowed to protect our stock with force here, but the increased density of houses in rural areas makes it harder to find clear, safe sight lines on the offenders.
Predator protection costs add a lot of overhead to our wool and meat. Each guard dog puppy has nearly $2,000 invested in it before ever becoming a reliable guard animal.
Sometimes, I wish the urban folks who think predators are cute could see the devastation they cause. No one wants to see bears shredding sheep and guard dogs, or coyotes dragging still-living lambs off while their mothers desperately try to save them. Worst of all are the wolves, which attack and kill the guard dogs before decimating the sheep.
So far, we’ve been very lucky. We haven’t lost any sheep to predators since adding a fourth guard dog to our roster. All four of them share the burden of patrolling our 20 acres of land. We have lost geese, lost chickens, and even had sheep injured, but none have been lost since. I hope we can continue to keep enough dogs on hard to protect our precious animals well into the future.
