A friend of mine brought me two dozen eggs yesterday from her farm.

I learned that hens produce more eggs in warmer months than in colder ones — which stands to reason, unless you’re from new York City, where eggs are produced in air-conditioned grocery stores year-round and 24/7 — and with it getting warmer here lately — it’ll be in the 70s+ for the next ten days — the hens are doing more of their hen thing. (What do they actually do besides lay eggs? And doesn’t the verb “lay” conjure up only two nouns: bed and eggs? More New York questions that I share with only you three who are reading this.)

I happened to ask her about foxes, given their rather too-cozy relationship to hens — “cozy” as in being the “big spoon” to their little one until hunger overcomes them and spooning transitions to dining — and given my experiencing a mysterious sound the other night that Karen later determined was indeed a fox and not a werewolf. (I was not about to admit that I experienced horripilation — read the post HERE — over a fuzzy red dog that probably was a hundred yards away.)

My friend said that, yes, there were foxes, but a bigger issue was coyotes. We discussed the unique bark of a fox — my now having expertise in distinguishing a fox bark from a werewolf growl — and then she said that coyotes, too, have a unique bark: “They sound like a bunch of drunken frat boys,” and she played a video on her phone taken from her property where, indeed, the pack sounded like inebriated males with underdeveloped frontal cortices. Grinning, I concurred with her comparison, though my smile was only half-sincere since she was not aware that I, too, had sounded that way when I was in college, and I didn’t have a fraternity membership to blame for it.