My chickens

A little pre-curser to my blog post to yank your memory chain about who I have been and how I live now.  I have worn many hats and have a full life with many great memories.  One of my past life's occupation was as the owner of Gnu Adventure Travel Company, where I not only specialized in Africa Photo Safari's, but for that matter, any exotic travel destination I could conjure up.  As we all know, life changes for various reasons that could be boring as hell to some, and extremely interesting to others.  For the parallel with my chickens now, I am going to focus on my "true adventure travel destination, which was Africa".

Known as "Mama" by my Africa outfitters in the past, I used to watch with great interest, the "food chain" in action; lions on a kill, hyenas surrounding some small helpless animal, etc..  My outfitters were well versed in explaining animal behavior to me.  I always understood and fully appreciated each animal's need to survive, so I was not so bothered by what I witnessed.  Oh---another past fact about me which may or may not cause you to continue or discontinue following this blog... I was also a hunter as a young woman, so watching the food chain was also a little easier for that reason.  Aside from that , as I approach life now, it becomes more and more difficult to see any life end, no matter the reason.

Now, I live on a beautiful ranch in Eastern Washington where the deer regularly trim my rose bushes, veggies, grapevines, etc., coyotes howl in the distance, cougar hang out around the barn, but there are no lions, hyena, or harrier hawks.  I have no heart to do the predators here harm, but have great disdain for the damage they do. So given all of this blather, I'll show you a picture of my vibrant sweet chickens taken one and one half weeks ago and then follow with where my chickens are today and wonder what your thoughts might be.

I went to the hen house to gather eggs and opened the door to find a hen lying dead, for no apparent reason.  She had been out enjoying the daffodils and grubs, the day before.  I couldn't figure out what had happened, and decided she must have been sick and died from natural causes, then wondered if a predator had been lurking about, unbeknownst to all of us.  I wrestled with my feelings about the sight of her all day and had a difficult night sleeping...then decided it was "just her time".  

Each day, the roosters have a routine where they crow and call all of the hens to get up and get with the program, but the next day, only one rooster crowed and he crowed all day long.  They don't stop crowing until all of the heads are accountable and I don't know how they know.  I took a head count of my own and saw that there was another head missing.  There is something sinister about going to a hen house that has had problems, so as nervous as I was, I headed down to see what was happening.  YES, there was another hen lying dead in the hen house, but also, my beautiful robust and healthy bard rock rooster was nowhere to be heard or seen.  I searched around the 42 acres that I live on and finally found the remains of him.  I am certain he put up a good fight defending himself and his hen, but there is not much solace in that thought.

I won't continue with the gore, except to say that tonight, instead of eight beautiful chickens, I have only five.  Something smarter than all of the chickens and me, is out there waiting for the next opportunity and there's not much I can do short of sit out there all night with a shotgun.  Again I am watching the food chain, except this time it hurts.