Birthday Mauling

This last week was my birthday.  And all in all it was a pretty good day; yoga, flowers, chocolates, shopping, lunch with the family, until we got home.  As the girls often do when we get home, they ran to the chicken coop to let the hens out to stretch their legs until night-fall would call them back to the coop.  They quickly ran back to us hysterical and in tears.  The chickens were already out of their coop and apparently the coop looked like it had been “attacked”.  Marc and I headed over to what honestly looked like a mauling:

Let me back up a minute to give you some back-story.  We’ve had the chickens now for a little over a month.  They’ve been really fun and quite delightful; in addition to providing us with amazingly delicious eggs.  I think we’ve all been surprised to discover how attached we’ve become to the chickens.  At this point they definitely feel like pets to us and we’re getting to know each of their personalities a little better and YES we can tell them apart.  :)

Reese is the most outgoing of the bunch and whenever she sees us she literally runs over; hoping there might be some food.

Sadie initially seemed to be the mother hen.  

She's very sweet and a bit better behaved than the other two.  ;)

Zoe has probably changed the most over the course of the month.  She started out as being shy and a follower of the other two.  And now she’s clearly the leader of the group and I’ve even caught her being a bit of a bully, especially to Sadie.  Pecking her to move over or taking her spot where she was comfortably lounging in the sun.  Chicken psychology…..who knew!

A couple weeks in, Reese and Zoe were getting into all kinds of mischief.  When we’re home during the day we try to let the chickens out so they can roam and forage.  Unfortunately though our yard is not completely fenced in so they do end up wandering a bit; never too far though. 

One day I was working outside a bit and had left the kitchen door open.  When I came back in I found the two of them perched under the table and not anxious to leave the house.  Another day Reese and Zoe literally disappeared for half the day.  We searched all over and they were nowhere to be found.  It was almost time to pick the girls up from school and I was getting ready to have to tell them that the chickens had disappeared when I decided I better go look one more time.  I walked up the driveway to the main street that leads to our house just in case they had wandered that far and sure enough, there they were walking up the street back to the house!!  Where in the world had they gone?  They sauntered past me and back to the yard completely oblivious to the fact that I had just stressed out for half the day imagining all the worse possible scenarios of what could have happened to them.

But the innocent mischief started to get worrisome a week ago when Marc found Reese looking rather frazzled and stressed in the neighbor’s open yard along with a bunch of feathers on the lawn.  He couldn’t find the other two!!  Again, around the time to pick the girls up from school the other two suddenly appeared in the yard; seemingly okay.  We couldn’t figure out what had happened until three days later when I was just getting up from the table to start on lunch and happened to look out the front window to see the neighbor dog, in the other neighbor’s yard, tossing one of the chickens up into the air!!  I quickly ran over and rescued Sadie who visibly seemed okay albeit with some feathers missing and a look of stress in her eyes.  Marc grabbed Luna and took her back to her house.

Luna’s house shares a fence with ours and apparently she found 2 holes in the fence where she could leave her yard and get into ours.  Pre-chickens this had been fine.  She’s a sweet and playful dog who loved to come over and play with the girls.  Post-chickens however her playfulness is clearly a problem with the chickens.  It didn’t seem like she wanted to hurt or eat them.  I think she just wanted to play but clearly it was not mutual.

Marc told her owner what had happened and of course she felt bad but claimed that she had tried to fix the holes and couldn’t get to them through the bushes that had grown around them.  Well so now of course we were on hyper alert whenever the chickens were out.  Two days later was my birthday and since we were gone most of the day we had left the chickens in their coop.  We never imagined they wouldn’t be safe inside their coop.  Clearly we were wrong, as we discovered when we got home and saw the coop in ruins. We have no absolute proof it was Luna but can’t imagine any other animal doing it.  We're pretty convinced that if it had been a fox the chickens would have been dead.

We found Zoe and Sadie pecking around and they amazingly seemed okay but we couldn’t find Reese.  We finally found her under the bushes and she was not budging.  As night was starting to fall I was finally able to coax her out.  From the looks of it she got the brunt of the attack.  I’ll save you the visual but let’s just say her backside was in a bad way.  She managed to walk back over to the coop, drank a bunch of water, and made her way into the house for the night with the other two.  It took quite a bit of coaxing as the other two did not want to go back in.  While Marc was fixing the coop fence, Zoe actually flew up on top of the coop and wanted to stay there.

It’s been four days since the attack.  Marc found both of the holes that Luna had been escaping through and was able to board them up.  No Luna since and no more attacks since?!?!  The coop is stable but not sure if it’s going to make it through the winter.  Reese is hanging in there, surprisingly.  We did some internet research, “how to care for an injured chicken”.  We did our best to clean her wounds with hydrogen peroxide and separated her from the other two.  We’ve been trying to feed her extra protein and even some garlic to help with healing and lessen the chance of infection.  She’s been sleeping a lot and only eating a little.  It’s still too soon to know if she’ll make it but today there seemed to be a little turn for the better; she ate more and was walking around more with the other two.  A little glimpse of her former self.  Although she still can’t scratch for food, today was the first day she tried to.  We're all hoping she'll pull through.