The Wildthings

I should have warned you, this was installment 1. There is more. No, things have not changed much just because we moved...obviously, someone packed this luck in a box and took it along with us. Unbenounced to me, someone has opened that box...

One of Bill's latent farmer wannabe projects has been this deal with the chickens. So far, we have purchased 65 little chickens, 4 ducks and 2 half grown chickens. The first 25 little chickens met with a cruel fate--Bill. Anyway, we raised chickens when I was a kid, and it's been awhile, so I forgot a few of the finer details and he wouldn't listen to those that I remembered. This spring has been unusually cool. Little chickens do not do cool well. They also do not do drafts well, although the chicken coop that Bill built was "intentionally" left with air circulation and ventilation by design. The design got changed.

Two weeks ago, we got 40 more little chickens. Now, the first really nice day, Bill opens up the chicken house door and lets all of the chickens out in this huge pen he has built around the coop...it took 140 foot of chicken wire to enclose it one time, so I know it's big. But, by all counts, even in a space like that, it seemed that the numbers were thinning. The only barometer we had to go by was the two larger chickens and the ducks. Try counting heads in a moving mass sometime. :)

By Monday morning, there were 17 chickens in total left. Bill's pride has been wounded. Believe me, the only thing he hasn't blamed for stealing his chickens was a UFO. :) He's been driving me nuts with his theories...the man doesn't talk alot, except now it's only about these chickens and what is happening to them.

By Monday night, there are 12 left, with one of the larger chickens being gone. So much for the birds of prey theory...the chickens were in the coop all day long. And, there are no feathers or sign of struggle...something had to be big enough to kill it and carry it off with no problem. The littany of possible offenders grows, but at least the cat and the dog are off the hook.

Bill sat out there with a spotlight until almost midnight Monday night. A spotlight and an unloaded gun...Yeah, I asked what he was going to do with that. He said he'd use it to hit whatever got in the chicken house. Needless to say, the culprit was either full or scared off by the flood lights. I was more concerned that whatever it might have been was big and mean and that hitting with the handle of a 22 would just make it mad. ;)

So, he comes in at midnight with fur and stories of the claw marks inside the chicken coop where the offender got in and out. I thought we had taken care of those ventilation design problems...well, not on the back of the coop. So, now we have hair samples and claw marks...I was waiting for him to ask about my pull with the FBI crime lab. :)

This morning, the dog got a little upset...there is this undomesticated cat running through the woods with the dog in hot pursuit...While Bill was in pursuit with the dog, he knocked over a hollow tree which happened to be a bee tree...a whole nuther story. Anyway, our cassanova tom cat has been spending a lot of time in the woods. We think he's probably hanging with the chicken thief, although we are not sure they are the same breed of cat...