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18/03: Spring Concerns
Hello everyone –My apologies, as many of you know the other blog (of he who must not be named) has sucked a lot of my time away, and so this blog feels a bit like the forgotten child. I will try to do better about adding regular comments…. to both.
This is the time of year that creatures begin to stir – and get hungry. It seems our chickens are in peril. On Sunday morning I walked into the kitchen to poor the girls orange juice, and I glanced outside the window to see Delilah staring back at me. For those (most I suppose) that don’t know chickens you may not know that they have regular habits, and are not solitary creatures. Delilah looked odd to me, and it was not her awkward scrawny Aricana neck, it was that she was on the top rail of the porch (she has never frequented the top rail) and she was by herself, also she seemed to be plaintively looking directly at me. It was not for a couple of minutes that the impact of that chickens stare hit home to me, and I was filled with worry. I told Tory I was going to check on hens, but before I could pull my boots on she came down to tell me that she could see feathers scattered through the snow in the backyard.
Finding all the chickens was difficult – two were on the back porch, three in the barn, two in the chicken coup…. But we were still missing one, Despereaux. Despereaux is our favorite chicken, next to Delilah, she is a small barred rock hen that is tiny black and white checked thing and a reliable layer. I was searching near the coop when I heard the very sad sound of a chicken in distress. And it took me several moments before I could isolate the sound, which was coming from the loose stones that make up the bottom of the barn. Not much of her was showing, just a bit of her backside, and it was clear as I pulled her reluctant body out of the wall, that she had tried to hide herself in the space, but left her backend exposed. The creature, whatever it was, had taken the opportunity to snap at her, removing all her tail feathers, and leaving her bum red and raw.
Many of the chickens had lost feathers – Boticelli, the big barred rooster, had all of his long, beautiful striped tail feathers removed. He now marches back and forth in the confines of the locked cage, oddly emasculated without his plumage. All of the hens are a bit nervous, but recovering. I am on the prowl for whatever it was to make a return visit. In the warm sun the scattered feathers are busy twisting and burrowing holes in the snow, like pebbles through bedrock in the eddies and pools of rushing spring streams.
