There's a lot of reality in farming. Sometimes that gets lost. It's easy to start out with perfect visions of an ideal world where everything and everybody gets along.
See, we thought that the presence of horses and the dogs would keep predators at bay. Fact is, the horses and dogs tend to stay close. They go where we go.
Lulu and I set the birds loose on the pasture, smiled at their delight, and went back up to the house. The dogs and horses followed. We thought everybody would be fine as we left to run errands.
When we returned, I started down to check on the birds and tuck them in for the night. Something wasn't right. Tex ran over to me and looked... off. I thought maybe he'd done something, but that wasn't the case at all. Sorry for thinking that, Tex. My guess now is that he looked guilty because he felt it was his job to protect our birds and he was unable to meet the task. There was a lot of fence between him and the birds. He couldn't have gotten there even if he wanted to.
The clearing was empty. No chirping, no quacking. Not a single sign of our birds. Well, that's not true. There was one sign. My eye found the red, feathered stillness next to the coop. My heart sank and I expected the worst.
I ran over to see that one of our hens had been killed. Her wounds were devastating and consistent with descriptions of hawk predation.
The other birds were all in the coop. They were huddled under the nest boxes and they looked scared. They were hushed, as if making noise would cause the terror to revisit.
I called Lulu and she hurried out to the pasture. The day was turning to night and there wasn't much we could do except bring a bucket to collect the remains. We locked up the coop and set off to bury our little hen.
