this post brings you some sad news on the homestead.
we’ve had two chickens die this week, carried away by hawks (or maybe the same one), never to be seen again. the first victim was our bantam rooster, roosty, who we’ve had since early on in our homestead life. we didn’t see him get attacked and we didn’t even realize that he was missing until he next day. the hawk must have swooped down during the day when all of the chickens were out ranging around the yard and carried him off. we never heard a sound during the day and when the chickens went in their bantam mobile at night, we never counted to see if they were all there (we never do this, since they are always so crowded together and it’s hard to count them in the dark).
the second hawk attack was today. as far as I can tell, we lost one bantam. i’ve looked through my list of all my bantams and their names and descriptions and it looks like teeny was the one taken. i heard a noise and went outside to see all of the chickens hiding under bushes or in their houses. i walked around a bit and didn’t see any hawks, and then I went back inside. a few minutes later i heard a similar noise and went back out again, just in time to see a bantam being carried off by a medium-sized hawk. i was in shock at first, because the hawk looked like one of our standard barred rocks, and i thought that perhaps two chickens were simply fighting. by the time I realized what was actually happening, the hawk was flying over our field of pine trees with the bantam firmly in its grasp.
r.i.p. roosty. We will miss you.
i still need to recount all of the chickens when i go back outside this afternoon, and get the one bantam that is running free back in her house. then i should be able to double check our losses and make sure that we lost just one today (still one too many!).
all in all, a sad day. and an interesting ending to 2014.
one of our resolutions for 2015: be more careful about when we let the chickens out to range free!!!
.:.