Sadness in the farm yard

I haven't written for the last few days, because I intended on doing a catch-up post today.  I've been doing work-for-pay and the weather hasn't been all that wonderful.  Cold and wind.  Who wants to hear me gripe about that? 

Today was a pretty decent day, weather-wise.  Cloudy skies and some wind, but I could go outside and not feel like I was freezing.  

Basically we were outside quite a bit today. We were puttering with the lawn tractor so my husband could grade the driveway. The chimney was cleaned out and I was in and out frequently, checking on plants, helping my husband and puttering over in the garden area. 

About 4:30 p.m. I looked out the living room side window and spotted our roo, K2, and our oldest hen, Pontiac. 

Apparently Pontiac decided she wanted to catch some afternoon sun and K2 has *always* been attentive to her, and keeping an eye on her.  

Around 15 minutes later, I saw out the big window, the majority of the flock was in the front yard and they had ALL spooked.  It was weird.  I went out to see what was going on, why they would have spooked like that.  

I stepped out, looked around, I heard a crow cawing up in a tree, then looked back down.  

Pontiac, the matriarch of our flock, was dead. No obvious signs of injury. 

The flock was huddled around one of the cars and I went back in the house to tell my husband.  He came out with me and we looked things over.

By this time the flock was scattered all over the front yard, so we tried to wrangle them to the back yard.  

That is when we realized something was seriously wrong.  

Piles of feathers and a decent amount of our hens were missing. 

We had a predator attack. 

I am so sad, you guys. It has been years since we've had any signs of a predator in the area. And it killed one of our hens within feet of our front window. 

It hurts. 

Not as bad as that first predator attack that nearly wiped out the flock, but it hurts bad enough. 

We wrangled the chickens to the back yard. Looked for as many as we could.  Then got them all into the coop.  It's going to be a long time before we let them out to free range.  

Feffer was missing for a short bit too.  I panicked a little, wondering if we'd see him again.  He popped out of somewhere and ran to my son. 

Then we went looking and we found some of the hen's bodies and my heart broke a little bit more. The crows were hanging around so we knew they were out there. We went and looked around the trees that the crows were in. 

We made the rounds around the house and spotted a hen in the front yard, closer to the road.  She looked a bit shell-shocked and lost without her flock.  My husband caught her, gave her some kind words, and carried her to the coop. 

After being reasonably sure we found them all we went back in.  A short while later I went into the kitchen, looked out the window and spotted another one of our hens.

I wouldn't be surprised if there are any more hens appearing tomorrow.  I remember from the other predator attack that hens may randomly reappear after hiding for a day or so. 

So ... yeah ... that was my day. We lost at least five hens.  It could have been worse, we keep telling ourselves.  Doesn't make it hurt any less.