Portage River Farm

A few nights ago the quiet of our home was suddenly shattered by an eruption of barking from the front room. The children had just gone to bed and I was in the back of the house having a conversation with Janet. Aidan came running down the hall with alarm in his voice telling me the obvious fact that "The dogs are barking!!" The commotion even stirred Freya from her bed who came out to follow me down the hall to see what was going on.

In our old house in Ypsilanti, the barking of the dogs was a nuisance noise that elicited little more reaction from the rest of the family than a half-hearted scolding to "Be Quiet!" from elsewhere in the house. The world outside our home was a busy place with families walking their dogs and mailmen cutting through the yard on the way to our porch. Finn and Sirona would spend much of their time gazing out the front window or "dog television" and rarely let anyone pass by without a giving out a bark or two.

Life on the farm is another situation entirely. The dogs still look out of the window but the green world outside rarely presents anything worthy of comment. Occasionally Finn will alert us to the passing of our little deer herd but usually his barking is an indication that somebody is coming up the driveway.

On this particular evening, his barking was especially insistent. I looked out the front window but saw no cars nor people. With Freya cautiously in tow, I walked out into the front yard and shined a flashlight into the dark. In the hope of stirring some movement and probably a tiny bit to settle my own nerves, I shouted a warning "Hah!". After a few more minutes of looking around, I concluded that whatever had peaked Finn's interest had moved on. We returned to the house and our evening went on as before.

Around two-o-clock in the morning, we were again disturbed by frantic barking from the living room. As far as I know nobody else stirred but I rocketed out of bed to investigate. This time I found Finn standing at the back window barking and growling excitedly. I grabbed a flashlight and a dog leash and we headed out to have a closer look.

Immediately upon passing through the doorway into the cool night air, Finn puffed himself up with all of the hairs on his back and neck bristling. Clearly on the trail of something, he sniffed the air and pulled on his lead. We raced across the yard toward the chicken coop while I encouraged him to "show me what's out here boy!".

We searched around coop, we headed a little way into the woods and we circled the house. All the while Finn sniffed excitedly at everything. In the end we failed to track down or scare up anything. I found myself wishing that he could talk and could tell me what it was that he was smelling.

The next morning, I was going through my usual chicken-feeding routine before heading off to work. I had pretty much forgotten about the adventure of the previous night until I approached our shed in the backyard. I found that our nocturnal visitor had chewed a big hole in a fifty pound bag of chicken feed and had spilled much of the contents on the shed floor. I moved the remaining feed into a trashcan as I should have done from the start and cleaned up the mess.

At the end of the day, Aidan and I were working on the garden when we discovered a couple sets of tracks in the mud near the shed. I retrieved one of our field guides to animal tracks and we sat down to determine the identity of our visitor. Right away I could see that two very different animals had been there.

One set of tracks were easy to identify as raccoon. This was pretty much what I had expected since neighbors had been warning me that the raccoons could be a nuisance. The second set of tracks, however, proved to be a bigger identification challenge.

The field guide that I was using was meant to cover the eastern half of the country so I knew it would include some animals that didn't live in our area. As I scanned back and forth through the pages, one particular animal stood out as the best match for the tracks. I would look at the track and tell myself that it was the best match but that it had to be something else.

I methodically worked from one animal to the next and made certain that there were no other matches. It was too big for a skunk. It had too many toes to be a fox or large cat. The clear separation of the toes from the central pads and the close placement of toes ruled out raccoon. The deep claw marks ruled out a number of other possibilities.

In the end I had no option left but to return to the original track that seemed improbable, that of the badger. Unsure if it was even possible, I consulted the Michigan Department of Natural Resources website. To my surprise, it told me that badgers are indeed in our area although they are rare.

Weighing all that I have seen, I have concluded that the raccoon was the culprit who was disturbing our sleep. A little more observation around our home led me to the discovery that an old bird-feeder had been knocked off of the deck railing just outside of our back sliding door. I imagine that he was after the bird seed inside and the resulting crash alerted Finn to his presence.

Thanks to the racoon's clumsiness, Finn and I had a few minutes of adventure during the night. More importantly, he raised our level of curiosity and observation of our surroundings which led directly to the discovery of our more rare visitor, the badger.