Still no sign of another mink. But nature abhors a vacuum ( which is why I won’t let anyone bother my good band of coyotes). I have never had any trouble with the pack of coyotes whose territory includes my farm. If they were shot we might have a killer coyote move in. And now that Boo and I have rid the henhouse of that big killer mink we have to wait and see who will take over his territory.
Nature is an interesting playground. The land I work with is full of such a diverse range of animals and birds and my aim is to live in it with as little fight with them as possible. But the simple act of fencing, farming and introducing animals to a piece of land is by its very nature the antithesis of natural. It is disruptive.
Still, the coyotes and foxes and minks of the land adjust to a food source. I have become part of that source. So I will adjust to them. 
Nature is naturally messy and disheveled and wild and though full of patterns also embraces a kind of righteousness and insistent chaos. 
I keep trying to tidy my world up and my environment walks along behind me spreading micro-organisms and weed seeds and random native viscousness and rot and decay and wildness chuckling to itself. And hopefully not choking to itself – I try hard not to poison my little patch.
Left to my own devices I am quite sure I would let it all go and join the wilderness. But to literally keep this little patch of land under my stewardship, in a modern world and for this human to live on it – it needs to pay its way. Taxes are as inevitable as decay.
What an odious thought. I was much happier daydreaming about going feral.
I hope you find loveliness today.
It is overcast and blustery here.
Love celi
The Kitchen's Garden 
30 responses to “DUCK CAKE”
Your photos capture my attention, leaving me with great starts to my own imagination. I need that after a long Winter where I live and flooding in my state on the western side and in Nebraska.
Where I live, we need the coyotes to control ground squirrels on the levees and rabbits in the row crops. They do a great job of that. They eat a little sweet corn and watermelon, but no one complains. There is at least one with an appetite for feral cat, so in the winter I try to keep the cats well fed and safely out of the fields. I wish they ate raccoons.