Portage River Farm

Noise

I am a night owl and don't require as much sleep as the rest of the family. Most nights will find me knocking around the house until 2 or 3am. At a little after midnight a few weeks ago I walked out into the dark to retrieve something from my car. As I approached the vehicle a sudden explosion of unfamiliar noise stopped me in my tracks.

Hopefully if you click on the link above you can hear what I did. It is a crazy collection of high-pitched wailing, wavering howls and barks. It sounded as if somebody was torturing a large number of puppies nearby. It was very loud and seemed to be coming from the wooded area across the road to the west of our farm. It sounded as if it would have taken at least ten individual animals to make that much racket.

Since that night I have figured out that the noise comes from our apparently sizable population of coyotes. Most evenings, I can walk out on the deck and listen to them howling back and forth. On the occasions when they gather together for a group howl, as I had heard that first evening, it can be amazingly loud. Now that I know what to listen for, I can hear them in our closed up house, even over the furnace and whatever other noises are around me.

I imagine that we are destined for a rocky relationship in the future as we fill our farm with tasty treats such as chickens, ducks, turkeys, calves and goat kids. It has me thinking about strong fences and even worrying about our dogs a little. I would think they would avoid a scrap with Finn, our 90lb yellow lab. Sirona, on the other hand, is a frail and elderly 40 lbs that would probably be much more tempting.