5 AM Surprises

I leave the window open at night because I like to sleep in the cold and burrow under blankets. This also normally means I wake up with the sun and Big Red's non-stop greeting of it.

This morning I woke up to a different type of chicken noise; a strangled squawking. This noise awoke me abruptly, and it sounded like it was receding into the distance by the time my fuzzy brain recognized it. I threw on my robe and flip flops, turned on the floodlights and went outside. My hens were in the pen, huddled in a corner of the coop, while Big Red was still sound asleep in the house. My two juvenile roosters were nowhere to be seen. I searched around their coop, and checked their house. They weren't in their usual perching spot. There were also no feathers that I could see. My best guess was one of the boys had gotten nabbed by a passerby fox, and the other had run into the corn field across the lane, or was hiding under some bushes. It was still pitch black outside and I wasn't about to go tramping through the corn calling for a chicken that may or may not be there and may or may not come to me.

So I shrugged and went back into the house. Once the sun came up and I had eaten my breakfast, I went back out to investigate. Standing in my backyard were both roosters, who came running up to me looking for food. The white one looked as if he was missing some tail feathers, and he had a strange burr on his belly, but had not a mark on him. There was a trail of white underfeathers spread around the coops and some in the front yard, but how much of it was there beforehand is impossible to determine.

I put an ad on my school digest this morning to try to find them a home. I guess I'm a sucker for a friendly chicken and some pretty tailfeathers. If no one wants them I suppose I'll get up the gumption to eat 'em one of these days but...I was almost hopeful the foxes had taken that decision out of my hands. Guess not. So there they sit, basking in the sunlight beneath the pine trees in my backyard, freely reining the yard since they refuse to stay in their pen and I'm too lazy to figure out a better way to keep them in.

~Melissa