Raccoons 0 – Chickens still 4
Now could I pass up this story? Living with the Henson’s provides me with so many opportunities to write I let a lot of them pass by. But this one…gotta share this one with apologies to our neighbors.
About a year ago Erica decided to move on her long time dream to own chickens. Even though at several points in her life she chose not to move onto the dream farm that the said chickens are a picturesque part, she still wanted the chickens. So the research began, just like any good suburban housewife she checked out books from the library and got all of the family on board. I learned of the killing cone in one book, which was such a disturbing series of images I chose to block its description from my mind, the purpose being obvious. When she decided where she would purchase the chickens from she picked up the proper paperwork and the choosing process began.
We saw many different colors and varieties of chicken and on the order sheet next to the physical description were also a temperament description. We went with the friendly and laid back type knowing the boys would want to carry them around. We avoided the feisty type even though they apparently produce the blue eggs which we all really wanted.
As the delivery day drew near we had heard from many friends, many pieces of sound advice and some, well actually, disturbing stories mostly pertaining to losses due to raiding bands of raccoons. Erica informed me much later that she thought that was just a lack of diligence on the owner’s part. Insert appropriate foreshadowing here.
For whatever reason, I don’t remember now, we got chickens, not chicks. They were already kind of tall and they already smelled like farm animals. No cute fluffy stage, straight to teenage b.o. and awkward hair growth stage. Their feathers were kind of clumped together and it only took about 5 minutes in a plastic tub in the basement to realize that those quarters were woefully inadequate. At the end of the first day we had already had to clean chicken poo off of Colin Jr. and Cheese.
Oh yeah- the names. There are 3 boys, so they each named one, and Erica invited my niece Stella to also name one as an honorary chicken owner. We ended up with, like I said, Colin Jr. named after a dear friend of ours that the boys loved but whom we had lost to his meth addiction, Cheese, who is named this as she is the color of artificially colored Velveeta cheese. The other two were named Stewart, for no particular reason, and Noodle, named so by my niece because I think she remembered one of the boys had a hamster named that and she was always trying to find a way to relate to them.
The coop got built with only one incident halting its progress when the dad here, Dave, fell from the roof onto his back narrowly escaping physical injury, the same cannot be said of his pride as all of the boys were on hand to witness it. But nonetheless it got built and it was a pretty good looking coop too. It only took a few weeks for the redesign work to become apparent. After learning the chickens needed light a hole was cut in the big lift up door that provides access to the eggs, and on its third incarnation it finally worked and the coop was ready and waiting for its occupants.
The eggs. Now that’s a whole issue unto itself. I think we all just kind of thought they’d start showing up. And after the designated amount of time had passed and we still were not getting any eggs we asked our other chicken owning friends for advice. Again as with the general owning advice, the advice was sound and again this opened the door to other disturbing stories. As we were talking with a friend of ours with 6 chickens we told her that we thought we may have gotten a rooster by mistake. The law in the city is clear and it says no roosters. So when Stewart and Noodle, later renamed Feet, began to grow very large and wobbly combs, we were worried. Other than breaking the law, we knew roosters were often times mean and aggressive and didn’t want to be chased around the back yard all of the time. It was at this point that our sweet friend shared with us that you indeed cannot tell if they are male or female until they are grown and she had also had this misfortune to be mistakenly given a rooster which in fact did chase her around the yard every time she went out. To solve this problem, they suffocated it in a paper bag with some kind of chemical. Erica and I both were kind of sad and shocked by this, but knew we may have to do something if we did have an aggressive male in our midst. This same friend of ours eased our worries about the eggs and gave us some tips how to make the shells stronger by feeding them the crushed up shells of the eggs we had eaten. Also a disturbing piece of advice if you ask me.
We did eventually get eggs, not nearly as many as we thought, but good healthy white and brown eggs. Eggs that fresh hardly have a flavor at all. It’s very mild and kind of creamy and the yolk is a deep yellow, almost orange. They are delicious. And so the owning and eating went for almost a year without incident. They did spend the winter having free reign of the yard and due to excessive amounts of poo a pin area was recently created, but other than that they are relatively low maintenance and not nearly as noisy as I had expected them to be. Until 3 nights ago that is. That was the first night Erica was awake and heard a blood curdling scream coming from the back yard.
I’m not a light sleeper, nor a heavy sleeper, but I did for two nights sleep through the attempted murder of our beloved chickens. The masked specter that had killed all of our friend’s chickens had finally discovered our hen house and was making head way at least at plucking poor Feet clean of her feathers. For two nights I slept through the rescue as Eric chased the nasty beast from the back yard with a baseball bat. On this night, the one I am still awake in, I was the one to recognize the sound of desperation a chicken makes when her life is flashing before her beak.
Lots of flapping and squawking and I knew what was going on having been told the stories from that previous two nights. I ran from my room to the bottom of the stairs and yelled up to Erica’s room, “We’ve got chicken problems! The raccoon is back!” I heard her stir from a deep sleep and as I hit the back door heard her coming right behind me. I said, “Get you bat!” and as we made our way off the deck into the complete darkness that is midnight we could only guess at what was making the terrible noise and hope our sweet girls were all still intact. With all of the men in the house gone on a camping weekend, we alone, two women in pajamas and bare feet, stood to break the circle of life in the dog eat dog world of suburban farm life.
We headed over to the coop and I decided to go back into the house to get a light. Having no flashlight I got a 3 wick candle and made due. As I was lighting it in the house, I could hear Erica screaming outside, she sounded like a crazy woman. She was screaming and cussing and hitting the coop with the bat! When I got back to her she had also grabbed a yard rake and handed me the bat and by the dim light of my fresh balsam candle we saw the culprit scurry up to the top of the coop and freeze. It was huge! 3 of our 4 chickens were huddled in the corner near the front of the coop still clucking away and one was on the cross beam in the roof frozen with fear.
We could see where the evil doer had broken in by tearing the chicken wire from the side of the wall and making a hole to get through. We danced around hitting the coop with the bat and the rake, only making the raccoon crazier as it tried to find another way out.
Its earlier entrance from its first night attempt had been blocked by turning a hole in the wire into a back door that was now shut and we were standing in the way of the only other way out. I told Erica to open the front door and so she did and we screamed and hit the coop for another minute or two and then he saw his chance and bolted for the door and ran back to the side fence and clumsily made his way over it. It was at that point that Erica spotted the second one. Even bigger than the first, and dumber, it went back up into the nesting area and peered at us through the successfully redesigned window. I held my candle to the opening and there it was looking right at me.
Now I love animals and I in fact know a couple that you can read emotions on their faces. I know two dogs that just look worried when things are out of sorts. One of them is the Henson’s pit bull Pete. His huge square head wrinkles on the top and it just says, “I am worried, is everything ok?” But this animal, even with all of the noise and having been abandoned by its partner in crime, just looked blankly at me. It wasn’t angry our hissing or shaking with fear, just stared right at me like, “Hey, new development.” This one took longer to scare out the door. A couple of the chickens made their way out into the yard as we continued the ruckus, and finally it ran out and across the yard, past the completely uninterested Pete, and under the deck.
Not having any idea how to keep them from coming back nor having the desire to fix the broken wire at midnight, Erica decided the ladies would be better inside the laundry room for the night. So back where they started, a little worse for wear, our 4 lovely ladies are sleeping soundly in the basement where they spent their first nights with us not even a year ago.
As we tried to calm them and say goodnight, we could see where Feet has now lost all of her tail feathers, Cheese has a bloody spot on her head where part of her comb is missing, and Colin Jr. and Stewart have some bald spots of missing feathers as well, but overall, not too bad for their third nights battle.
We decided they were ok for the night and Erica was putting down some paper under the temporary roosting stick she had set up for them, I saw a feather fall from Cheese and I made a sad sound as it hit the floor. Erica stood up and we looked all wild eyed at each other for the first time since the mayhem began and we hear what we thought was poo hitting the paper layer and we smiled. We turned to look and it wasn’t poo but an egg that Colin Jr. had laid right that second. Erica said, “I thought that sounded loud for a poop. Look – she just had the egg scared out of her.” And we laughed and were sad for our sweet chickens as we said goodnight and left them to rest and recoup.
