Today we had a fun family day. With summer winding down (next week is our last week before school starts), we decided to play hard. My day started with a 5k, followed by a day on the lake, then off to a pioneer celebration at the stake center. It was all fun and games until I arrived home. I had recieved a voicemail from sister-in-law asking me to call her. When I did, she had bad news. In our hustle and bustle, we hadn't checked Bea (BarBQ)& Sue (General Tsu) our two Rhode Island Red Chickens, but my niece, Laura, had when they stopped by. My sister-in-law told me that Laura ran up to see the chickens. When she returned, she told her mom they were dead and there was a hole in the fence. After getting the children to bed, Rusty and I took a flashlight and went up to the coop. We immediately saw the hole (approximately 6 inches) in the gate. We didn't notice anything because this time of night, the chickens are in their house. When we looked in the house, I saw quite a few feathers, then chicken legs. I walked around the house to get a better view and saw the carcass of one of my beautiful, sweet hens. We looked around the coop and noticed some rocks were moved and then I noticed, just inside the gate between the hole and where the moved rocks were, the second carcass. My heart sank. I'm trying to think to the Spring, when I'll start over. Rusty said, to lighten my mood, that "we were supposed to get to eat them" (hence their names). Then we started planning for our next chicken herd. I like raising them from chicks because they are so darn cute and they get used to us handling them. Kinda' like a pet. On the way back to the house, Rusty did comment how he was bummed they were gone because he liked them. "They were beautiful" he said. I replied "Looks like we found something we can agree on." Rusty is a hard sell when it comes to animals...
5 comments:
Awww. That's sad. I hope your kids aren't too sad. Good thing they weren't the ones to find it.
Good luck with the next "herd". Is that really what they are called?! What about flock? Gaggle...nope that's geese. I'm a city girl, what do I know?:)
That is so sad! So did you figure out what got to them?
How sad! Were you really going to eat them when the time came? I think my kids would pluck and eat ME first!
Reminds me of what happened to mom's chickens. Remember only "Lucky" was left under the mamma hen's wing
I figure it was a fox or raccoons. Yeah. I remember that about moms' so I considered it could possibly be a skunk also. I'm going to take the winter off and regroup
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