Pigs, Chickens, Coyotes and Buzzards - Oh My!

 About two months ago, a chicken showed up on Perry Street in Centerville.  Now, there are a few people who have chickens in town, but this was a lone renegade hen that no one recognized.  And no one could catch her, although a few people tried.  So, she wanders through the neighborhood.  My friend Alice told me that she was hanging around her house quite a bit and I said, “She’s probably laying eggs somewhere. Y’all need to find her nest and have fresh eggs.”

One of her neighbors across the street starting feeding her, hoping, I think, that she would become tame enough to catch and relocate, but she remained elusive, although she did spend most of her time close by.  From time to time I would say to Alice, “That hen is laying eggs somewhere around there.  And if she finds a rooster, she will set on those eggs.”

Sure enough, Alice called me the other day and said, “The neighborhood hen has a whole bunch of baby chicks following her out in our front lot.”  This lot faces the highway and is bordered on  the other side by Perry Street.  Not a good location for free range chickens. I believe a family who raise 4-H chickens has been contacted to try and corral the hen and chicks.

You just never know what you will see in a rural county.  Last week I picked up a friend out on a back road and we were driving along when I saw something odd on the side of the road.  I thought at first it was a flock of birds, but when they started running down the road, I was pretty sure it wasn’t birds.  “What is that?” I asked.  Rena peered out the windshield and after a moment said, “Those are pigs!”  Sure enough, it was a whole herd, or whatever you call a group of pigs, of tiny baby piglets.  It looked like about twenty, but we were later told there were only ten.  I mean, these were little pigs – and no mama in sight.  They ran full speed in a tight formation as they scurried up the road then turned, still in formation, into their driveway and around to the back of the house.  It reminded me of a marching band, but much faster.  I looked at Rena and said, “Maybe we don’t need to tell anyone about seeing this.”  But of course we did.  I keep meaning to drive back down there and see if I can see them again.

Some time back, we were eating lunch at our favorite barbecue spot, on a hill going up toward the town square.  When I pulled in, I noticed five or six police cars parked a few hundred yards away and officers milling around in the weeds,  At first I thought it was a wreck.  When I asked, the lady at the counter said, “They are looking for a coyote.”  My first thought was that if they wanted a coyote, they could just come out to my house at night and find all they wanted, but this was apparently a specific coyote.  A man walking up the highway had called and reported being chased by a coyote and officers were dispatched to find the coyote. 

Now, there were a couple of things wrong with this plan.  First, if a coyote were to be chasing a man, I’m pretty sure the coyote would catch the man. There might be Olympic runners who could outrun a coyote but we don’t have any of those in Centerville.  Second, if a coyote had been chasing a man, I’m pretty sure the coyote would not be sitting around in the weeds waiting for the police to come looking for him.  “That coyote is long gone,” I told the lady at the counter.  We watched out the window while we ate our sandwiches and after about thirty minutes, they left without a coyote. I hope the coyote does not visit Perry Street and encounter the hen and chicks. 

This brought to mind another wildlife story about my hometown that has become somewhat of a legend.  Several years ago, a flock of buzzards took up a home in the trees around the city park.  No doubt they were a nuisance, and some people were concerned about the safety of their small dogs and cats.  Calls to city hall poured in and it was clear that something needed to be done about the buzzards.  But one remedy suggested to get rid of them was to hang a dead buzzard in one of the trees where they were roosting.  Here’s where the story took a bizarre turn.  Now, it is illegal to kill a buzzard, but upon contacting wildlife officials, it turns out that they actually have official dead buzzards in a freezer at one of their headquarters.  For the sum of, I believe, $120 the town officials were told they could come and get one of these official dead buzzards to hang in a tree.  Stanley Gordon was selected to make the trip.  He was given the money and off he went.  Upon his return, someone was dispatched to the park to hang the dead buzzard.  It seemed to work.  The buzzards, apparently alarmed by the corpse, found other places to roost.

A few days later, a group went on a visit to the park and spotted the dead buzzard hanging in the tree.  It caused quite a stir, and some of the people in the group got the idea that it was some sort of satanic ritual and called the police in a state of agitation.  An officer was dispatched to check out the body and apparently had not heard of the official dead buzzard, so he climbed up, cut the buzzard down and threw it into a gully.  The live buzzards returned to the park, although I believe in smaller numbers, and there was no more talk of dead buzzards in trees, official or not.  I think at least some of the buzzards are now roosting on some of the buildings on the town square. Sometimes it’s best to just leave well enough alone when it comes to coyotes and buzzards in a small town.

UPDATE:  The hen and chicks have been captured and are on their way to a new home.  No word on who the rooster might be who would be responsible for chick support.

 

 

The Case of the Mysterious Disappearing Chicken

All chickens are strange, if you ask me, but some are stranger than others. Ever since our last snow a couple of weeks ago, my mom and I have been involved in the “Case of the Disappearing Chicken.”
I guess it started the afternoon of the sudden snowfall. I came home from work early and after I fed the horses, it occurred to me that the chickens had probably gone into the chicken house and I could save my mom a trip outside by fastening them up. Surely even dumb chickens would have had sense enough to go inside to get out of all that snow! Not exactly. Most of them indeed were inside, but a little group had taken refuge in the shed by the smokehouse and I had the devil of a time getting them to leave their questionable and non-varmint proof shelter for the safety of the chicken house. After a lot of squawking, scrambling, and loud complaining (from all of us) I got them safely tucked in for the night and went to tell my mom of my good deed.
Sometime after dark, Mom called to say that she had just gone out on the front porch and found a little black hen sitting in one of the chairs, hunkered down in the cold. She picked her up and put her on the back porch until morning. Little did we know that this would not be an isolated incident, brought on by the snow.
The next night Mom called me again to say that she like to have never got that little black hen off the front porch and into the chicken house. She said she was clucking like she had a nest somewhere but it was nowhere to be found on the front porch but that she was adamant about staying there. I thought to myself that maybe she wanted to spend another night on the back porch, but that would probably be giving her too much credit for good sense. The plot thickened the next morning when Mom called me again to report that when she turned the chickens out, the little black hen made a beeline for the front porch. Not unexpected, but what really mystified her was that, in the time it took her to return her coffee cup to the kitchen, the little black hen disappeared into thin air. She had looked on, under and behind everything on the porch and had searched the front yard, the side yard and the garage with no success. I joined in the search and we again walked all around the house and investigated even tiny spaces that surely no hen could fit into. It was truly a mystery.
I went home and a couple of hours later, I came out of the house and found a little black hen on my carport. Now, since I had not seen the disappearing hen, I could not make an identification, but it seemed to me to be a logical conclusion. Since I was on the way to pick Mom up for a trip to town, I drove over and told her about my discovery. But, when we pulled into the driveway, the hen was nowhere to be seen. We searched the carport, walked all the way around the house and I even investigated the dog houses and the bed of my truck. Not even a feather was visible. I was beginning to feel like there was something uncanny about this chicken, but as we drove past my barn on the way out, there she was! We got out so Mom could make a positive ID and the little black hen was just clucking away and scratching in the dirt about the horse stalls. “That’s her,” Mom said, and we both agreed that not only was she the mysterious disappearing chicken but a very speedy mysterious disappearing chicken.
She spent the rest of the day in my front yard, scratching under the bird feeder and making occasional trips to the barn, where I began to suspect she had plans for a nest. Just before dark, Mom came over and persuaded her (with my shooing from behind) to follow her back home. She has been back every day since. It’s funny to watch her march over here, like she has a bus to catch or a job to report to and she has to be on time. And yesterday morning, she had dug most the dirt out the flower box on my front porch and was sitting in it clucking away. Maybe I will have fresh eggs for breakfast tomorrow!

Here a Chick, There a Chick

The only chicken I really like is on a plate, preferably fried with biscuits and gravy on the side. I never have liked chickens, from the time I was a little girl. My folks used to warn me about the roosters, saying to be careful around them because they might flog me. I didn’t know what flogging was, but it didn’t sound good. But then, with the sometimes strange logic of grownups, they would send me to the hen house to gather the eggs. I don’t know exactly why, but the hen house always seemed scary to me. It was dark and smelly and I was always thinking of getting flogged or seeing a chicken snake or getting pecked by an angry hen. My mama would go in there and reach right under those hens to get the eggs. Not me! There was always a bundle of cane poles in the corner by the door of the hen house, stored there until needed for the garden. I would pick up one of those poles and use it to pry and chase the hens off their nests before I even attempted to gather the eggs. I kept an eagle eye out for snakes, because one of the stories told about my daddy when he was a little boy was the time he put his hand on a chicken snake in a hen’s nest. So, gathering eggs was not a simple, happy task, but more like a scene from a gothic novel.
My mama, on the other hand, really likes chickens. The varmints who live around the farm really like chickens too, and gradually they have decreased the flock to fewer than a dozen hens and three roosters. So, Tim, who rents our farm and treats mama just like his own family, gave her fourteen hens for her birthday. He brought them in two coops, unloaded them and, according to her instructions, put them in the hen house for the night.
The next morning, mama turned out the newcomers along with her existing flock and it was then that things became interesting. Apparently, these new hens had never been outside in the real world. They also had never seen a rooster. And when they did encounter the roosters, they didn’t seem to like their looks because they spent half that first day chasing them all over the back yard. Mama told me later that night that they were the strangest chickens she had ever had. For one thing, they talked all the time. And they do, making that little “wraaark, wraaark” sound with their little heads turning from side to side. They also follow mama around, just like baby chicks follow the hen, talking all the while. All went well that first day, unless you were the roosters, and the newcomers joined the established flock in the hen house that night.
It was the second night that trouble began. I was at mama’s that evening, working on a jigsaw puzzle. She got up from the puzzle and said she was going out to fasten up the chickens. I was engrossed in the puzzle and didn’t notice that she had been gone longer than it should have taken, but suddenly, the front door was flung open and mama, with a big stick in her hand, burst in. Mama is about five feet tall and weighs less than one hundred pounds, but she can still outwork me on most days and you don’t want to make her mad. “Can you come out here and help me get these chickens up?” she said.
The new hens were the problem. Most the veterans were in the hen house, tucked in for the night. The newcomers were parading around the yard, occasionally going in the hen house and coming right back out, talking all the while. In the next half hour, I was reminded of one of the reasons I have never really liked chickens. I was stationed by the door and mama would round up a little group of hens and move them toward me. When I opened the door, the little groups would go inside. That was good, but the problem was that another little group would wander out the door at the same time. I really don’t know how, but we did finally get all the hens inside and slammed the door. I think next year, I’m going to suggest to Tim that a nice pot of flowers would be a good birthday present.