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
No comments:
Post a Comment