Chicken! Hawk!

I'd sooner, except the penalties, kill a man than a hawk;...
                                                         Hurt Hawks,

 Robinson Jeffers


In an earlier post I shared a bit of homespun wisdom from the environmentally sensitive Nancy L. "Ain't nothin' don't like a chicken," she said (the "homespun" grammar mine; the wisdom of the observation Nancy's). Our one slim acre is home to a four-flock, four hens (no 'roos). There are the two Brahmas, the elder girls Flo and Ida and the friskier Wyandottes, Penny and Agnes (pronounced Ag-uhn-ness--not egg-uhn-ness or Ahn-yes, in the French). The latter are replacement chickens: Penny the First went the way of Nancy L's saying (varmint of interest: a coyote); Agnes One was a bully and now belongs to Paula Thomas's flock which quickly reshuffled her status in the pecking order.

Every once in a while I like to give the girls some freedom for an hour or so, let 'em out to grub around in the dormant garden--a little proactive pest management, you might say. The other evening I opened their pen and watched them fall all over themselves exiting the enclosure. They had scarcely begun their scratch and peck routines when a large hawk glided over, did a double take, and quickly perched in a tall evergreen next door. Since "Ain't nuthin' don't like a chicken," I quickly aborted the hens' foraging session and herded the disappointed flock back into their covered run.

The next evening around 4:00 p.m. with about an hour of daylight left, I let them out again, returned to the house and some computer work I had going. I busied myself at the keyboard, was hard at work when out on the lawn there arose quite a ruckus. You've no doubt heard the phrase "squawk like a chicken?" Very likely have used it yourself a time or two, haven't you? Heeding the cry of a damsel in distress, I rushed out just in time to see a large hawk hunkered on the ground by the arborvitae. At my entrance, the bird quickly took flight and sailed off to the west. I'm fairly good at identifying birds of prey, can distinguish most raptors, but the larger ones I haven't quite nailed down yet. Any big hawk I lump into the general category of "chicken hawk." In past years a pair of rescue chickens, a hen and her 'roo, had dealings with a perp of that ilk; both ended up as piles of feathers. At the site of their demise it looked like a couple of pillows had exploded.

The eerie silence that followed the hawk's departure was deafening. I rushed to the epicenter of the commotion fully expecting to find carnage, blood, entrails, gore.... But nothing. Not a clump of down. Nary a pinfeather. Only silence. I stepped through the hedge in behind where I'd seen the hawk, parted the branches, and there was Agnes the Second doing her best to become one with the ground and the hedge duff. She didn't seem to be injured, but as a precaution, I gingerly scooped her up. Injured? Not Agnes. At my touch she began squawking like a chicken and struggling to escape. While her coop mates stood by curiously, I carried the squawking hen to the coop, dropped her inside, and shut the door.

I herded the "survivors" into the run and a half hour later released Agnes who began her chicken activities as if her recent trauma had never happened. The next day she laid an egg thus confirming my suspicion that chickens lack short term memory...if they have any memory at all. Not the case with this chicken rancher, though: the little flock's free range days are over--for a while, anyway--safe from aerial assault.

At Freddie's the other day I ran into the environmentally sensitive Nancy L and shared Agnes's adventure. She told me she'd recently seen a coyote loping across her property with a mouthful of chicken. "One of the neighbors' flock," she smiled.

Ain't nuthin' don't like a chicken....

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