Monday, May 26, 2014

Henrietta Comes Home


The chicken palace is now ready for the hens and I am anxiously awaiting their arrival from daycare.  They are now 6 weeks old and ready to come home to Mama.  I am worrying about them being stuffed into card board boxes and being driven 30 miles to their new abode.  Will they suffocate?  Will they fight with each other and peck each other’s eyes out?  Can we get them into the house without their escaping?

Last night I made John double check and screw in more screws along the footboards while I told him fervently that there WERE weasels in the neighbourhood.  It’s my long held belief that weasels can get into the tiniest crack and I still have the scene in my head when I came home to find my poor hens lying helter skelter across the backyard, flat as pancakes.  There’s a legend in these parts about vampire sucking weasels and perhaps I did have a little bit to do with that story.  The truth is quite simple, I had long been familiar with dead chickens as caused by the ravages of neighbouring dogs.  Those scenes involved chickens lying with their feet up in the air, or the butts turned up, necks askew, and feathers flying everywhere.

The summer morning when I returned from work to discover chickens lying like deflated rubber ducks, much as one sees in a cartoon was a shock I shall not soon forget.  There were 3 or 4 of them lying in the grass and there was no sign that a dog had been around.  The rest of the chickens were in the henhouse and looked as though they had experienced a severe shock themselves.  I wish I could say that there were little droplets of blood along their neck but truth must enter in . . . there was nothing to indicate what had caused the poor chicks deaths.

It was a car salesman who came up with the story of the vampire sucking weasel and I just went with it.  What can I say, it was a good story and being a car salesman, he sold me.   J

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