Toes Up

It started out a bad day for Nyel and it only got worse.  First, he didn’t feel at all well and when I offered to do the chicken duty, he readily agreed.  A bad omen in itself, I later decided.  When I arrived at the coop, all seemed well.  The four old girls were hanging out together, much as always.  But where were the new girls?

And then I saw one of them, toes up with her neck broken and bloody.  She was over against the hog wire fence and, oddly, there was quite a display of feathers above her, stuck to the wire and spread on the ground outside.

Guilt Free

“You killed her! I shouted at the Alpha Hen.  “Shame on you!  And what have you done with her sister?”  All four girls, Alpha Hen included, looked at me blankly – not with their usual interest in the scratch I was carrying, but not acting guilty or even weird about the chicken corpse only a few feet away.

I knew my rant at them was ridiculous and I knew my instinct to get Nyel was crazy.  I did both anyway.  Nyel managed to get down to the coop on his rider mower – walking that distance has become impossible.  I carried a bag and a shovel.  But before we did anything else, Nyel looked the situation over very carefully.  “I don’t think the hen did this,” he said.  I think it was a raccoon.  And he pointed out the small bits of flesh and the many feathers outside the coop fence.

I felt like I was in Chicken Pathology 101 and the forensics specialist was doing an on-site demonstration.  It didn’t take much to convince me that he was right.  We had looked high and low and in every possible cranny for the second new chicken.  She was gone.  “I think someone pulled her bit by bit through the hog wire,” he said.  And we both knew that Rocky Raccoon is totally capable of such a nasty deed.

“I’m so sorry, Big Red,” I said to the Alpha Hen.  “I should have given you the benefit of the doubt.  It’s just that you have a bad track record with respect to newbie girls. This time, you became a bit of a red herring I’m afraid.”

And, of course, there is always hindsight. We should have gone down to the coop after dark last night and physically carried those new girls into the coop, put them on the roost with the other girls, and locked them all in.  Instead, we figured they’d be okay.  We thought the old girls had accepted (or at least were tolerating) them.  And we were right as far as that was concerned.  But we were too complacent.  It’s been several years since Rocky Raccoon and his Band of Midnight Marauders have been around.  We had forgotten all about that possibility.

As I said, it was a bad day all the way around.