The Wilson family was gathering around the breakfast table one summer morning when Dad announced in a grave voice. "We are in a state of war." We children glanced at each other in hushed surprise, envisions of a third world war flashed across my mind. "With who?" we clamored, all eyes turned to him expectantly. "With the owls," he said, and then his somber expression dissolved into one of amusement as we all laughed together.
"For the past few nights," he continued after the excitement had died down, "Owls have been easily attacking and eating our turkeys, and now they're going to tell all of their owl friends about the "All-you-can-eat" Turkey buffet at Full Quiver. So we have to stop them." A flurry of ideas and opinions were then offered, ranging from the absurd to the workable. We first took into consideration the following facts.
1. Owls are a protected species. (Scratch the midnight hunting expedition approach)
2. Owls are afraid of unpredictable moving objects. (Cue the laughable: "We could get one of those motion activated Santa Clause’s that sing and dance and put it on top of the turkey shelter!" or "one of those blow up balloon-man thingy's they have to catch people's attention at car lots!".)
3. Owls are afraid of dogs.
We realized amid the flood of ingenuity that we must respect our neighbor’s entitlement to a restful night sleep. (Scratch the singing-Santa idea) After narrowing down the possibilities we decided on installing some homemade circular boards that we would attach to the corners of the turkey shelters. These would blow in any slight breeze and frighten away our midnight predators.
We also decided to use our farm dog, "Bess". Now Bess is getting on up there in years and hates to be posted on night-guard duty, so Dad, being the compassionate and resourceful farmer that he is, decided to record her barking. After he got the recordings he multiplied the barking and then burned it onto a CD. He then bought a cheap CD player and timed the recording to come on periodically to keep up the delusion that there was an actual dog on duty, but also turned the volume down enough not to bother the neighbors :)
We spent the day putting our ideas into actuality and then waited eagerly for the next day to come so we could see how our inventions had worked. The next morning we happily found all of our turkeys safe and sound and seemingly none the worse for having been serenaded by a dog barking CD all night. Needless to say, we were immensely pleased. Necessity is truly the mother of invention. :)
-Morgan
