This morning when I went out to feed the chickens, I made a heartbreaking discovery. Three of the five, beautiful new birds, I had gotten last week, were laying dead on the ground. At first I couldn’t see that they had any wounds on them, but then as I rolled them over, I noticed that they had all been bitten in the neck just below the skull.
I am beginning to learn that this is probably the work of a weasel. I heard that they bite and then suck the blood. Nothing bigger than a weasel could have gotten through the small squares in the wire fencing.
Now that I think about it, a weasel seems to explain the deaths of the other chickens that were killed this summer. When I inspected their corpses I was looking for big open wounds and I didn’t look close enough under the feathers on the neck. A weasel probably also explains why our original chicken started sleeping in the spruce tree instead of the chicken house.
I believe this puts an end to our having chickens. It doesn’t make sense to watch our 3 remaining chickens die to quench the thirst of a weasel, so I called Monica, from whom we got our chickens, and she said she would take our remaining three. Their lives should last a lot longer over at her place.
It’s too bad; both Joan and I enjoyed seeing the chickens wandering around and scratching in the yard, and it was nice to have the eggs, before all the drama this summer stopped their production.
See my paintings at: www.davidmarchant.ca
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