Goodbye Dolly.

This has been a horrible day. Early this morning, I found a pile of feathers that was once Henny Penny, one of the two chickens that we lost yesterday to hawks. In the middle of this afternoon, as it started to rain and I went outside to lock up the chickens in the coop, Dolly was missing.

Inside the coop were Audrey and the two Guinea hens. All three were very quiet, huddled together, not a peep out of them as they looked at me. Please not again. And where's Dolly?!

I walked all over the property around the house, the cottage, the barn. I looked inbetween the bushes, behind the palms, around the pecan trees, underneath the cottage. I kept calling Dolly, all the while knowing that she wasn't there because she would have come out at the first sound of my voice. Where's my Dolly-girl?.... and there she would be at my feet, looking up at me with her head cocked to one side.

We couldn't believe it had happened again, damn it. Three chickens in two days? Is that the work of just one hawk? Two? Three?! We'll never know, and it doesn't even matter. We called our across-the-road neighbor who has also lost chickens...... he told us to get a shotgun. Period. End of story. Get a gun.

Jeez. We don't want to be killing birds here. But birds are killing our chickens. And you're not even supposed to kill hawks in the first place. All the work that my husband put into making such a raccoon-safe coop for the chickens..... and they're being literally torn apart by hawks. Give me a blessed break.

So now we have Audrey, who is too old to lay eggs, and the two Guinea hens, who are too stupid to lay eggs. ("As smart as a pile of rocks," as our neighbor says.) Dolly laid an egg this morning, just before I went into the coop to clean it. I put the egg up to my face and it was still warm. Dolly was watching me, and I said "Thank you for the egg, girl." And she looked up at me with that yellow-eyed stare of hers, and I put the egg in my pocket and picked her up. She let me hold her while I thanked her for the egg again and again. Thank you for the warm little miracle, Dolly.

I will truly miss that beautiful red hen.

I told my husband we should get just two more chickens, as soon as we can get out to Watson's farm. We intend to keep our one remaining chicken and the two Guinea hens inside the coop for the next few days, to give the hawks a chance to realize there's no more food here for them, and hopefully, they will begin to shop elsewhere. So as long as we're going to keep these birds in the coop, we may as well get two new birds and keep them inside as well so they can get used to their new home.

I also suggested that we put up more chicken wire, and enclose the small fenced-in area just outside the coop. If all of that is fenced in with the wire, hawks won't be able to get our chickens. They'll have less room to roam around, but we also have fewer chickens now. And I'd rather have fewer chickens with less room to walk than more chickens who turn up missing due to fly-by hawks.

Jeez....... this has been a bad couple of days. I feel so sorry for those chickens...... we brought them here hoping to keep them safe, and we were out-done by hawks. Damn it all.