Itty Bitty Chicken Committee Went to College

Yesterday was not a good day.  I woke up at 4:30 am because of a death cry.  Even if you never heard before a cry of a chicken being eaten alive, you will know it the moment you hear it.  The cry was short and abrupt.  I wasn’t fully awake when it happened.  A weird second of silence followed it.  And then all the dogs in the neighborhood went crazy barking.  This is not the first time we lost a chicken or several chickens to local wild life – raccoons, possums, fishers, and even unsupervised dogs.  However, I thought it was just a hen.

If I knew the whole day will get from a dead hen to a dead day, I would have stayed in bed emailing and watching TV.  It rained like crazy.  Farmer Boy had to work outside, got wet, and now sounds like he is having an active case of TB.  I went to fix a tiny chip on the car window and had to pay a substantial amount for it.  I got two letters of job rejections.  I had a hair appointment, which for some weird reason lasted almost 3 hours.  My stylist was precise and thorough, and I know he just wanted to make sure that my grey takes the color, but… but...  I came out with great hair color, but also with the scalp that looks like a 3-year-old took a black Sharpie to it. 

I know it will wash out, so the scalp color is not the reason why I want to pull my hair out.  It wasn’t just a dumb hen, that didn’t want to go into a coup at night and became an easy target for a predator.  The dead chicken turned out to be the mama hen and her 8 babies (aka Itty Bitty Chicken Committee), which lived in a very secure coop and never left it unsupervised.  Farmer Boy raged the whole day at every little thing.  I couldn’t figure out why he was going nuclear till he finally told me the details.  I am known to cry uncontrollably when babies die, so he wanted to spare me.  Farmer Boy is inconsolable.  This was his first and only batch of babies this year.  He picked his best rooster and best hen.  He managed to care for the mama and eggs through the worst snowstorm.  He lost only one baby of the batch during the first week.  We spent some hours trying to guess their genders and dreaming of which one would be in the Fair this year.  His breading and chick care has improved immensely within only 2-3 years.  He doesn’t lose babies due to lack of knowledge.  We used to joke about hens, that were killed by raccoons – “She went to college”.  The babies were too young to go to college.  All the possibilities for developing the blood line, all the awards and ribbons they could have won, and all of it is gone.