Coyotes

All puppies are engaging.  These are coydog pups.

One of my coffee drinking acquaintances is a notorious bullshitter.  He is not a regular.  He varies his coffee drinking venue and time slot.  I presume it is to avoid wearing out his welcome.  Another advantage is that he does not need to keep as close a track of his stories.  There is a half life to knowledge.  In time he will have a new load of fertilize to amaze the knobs.

While I am not in a position to vouch for the veracity of his stories, some of them are entertaining enough to present as such...stories for entertainment.

In his most recent visit, he told us the story of his deceased wife's, nephew's, father-in-law's coy-dog.

For those who never heard the term, a coy-dog is a hybrid between a coyote and a domestic dog.  I perked up when I heard the start of his story.  Introducing some coyote genes would be just the ticket for averting inbreeding depression and, especially, hip dysplasia.  Why cross from one depressed, closed breeding book to another depressed, closed breeding book when one can find open-book, ruthlessly culled gene pools in-the-wild?

The story teller claimed that the owner kept the coy-dog chained up outside.  The owner also raised chickens the old fashioned way...he let them free range.  In very short order the chickens learned just how far that chain stretched.

The coy-dog had just enough success to acquire a taste for chicken.

He started scratching up sod and blown leaves and he patted them into a good sized mound just inside the limits of how far the chain would stretch.  After building the mound he acted as if the chain were a good three feet shorter than it was.  He would not nap atop the mound.  No.  He napped three feet closer to the pivot.

Birds

Chickens are drawn to scratching at mulch.  Some naturalists think they can hear the bugs crawling beneath the bark chips.  Robins are known to find worms by sound.  Woodpeckers know where to peck because they can hear the grubs and beetles beneath the bark.  "Sound" is a plausible theory.

Others think the chickens catch little visual glimmers of legs and scales.  They point to the ability of buzzards to find corpses that are out-of-sight from overhead.  It is believed that they see the swarming carrion flies...from 500 feet overhead.

By whatever means, most likely both auditory and visual, the chickens soon became aware that the mysterious, soft, fluffy mound of vegetation was riddled, buzzing, and winking with insect life.  It proved irresistible.

The coy-dog got his chicken dinner.