Last night Ady and I sat reminising on our Tour Of The North this time last year, tainted by the loss of Malice before we went and the subsequent finding of Malice while we were away, followed by the long and drawn out but probably quite inevitable death of Malice a month or so later. Seems July simply ain’t a good month for Goddard animals.
Last night around midnight there was something of a commotion in the chicken house. A load of flapping, thudding and cheeping. It was pretty much over before I’d really registered what it was and I debated going out with a torch to see but it was pouring with rain, howling with wind and as the noise had stopped I decided at best I’d find nothing other than some chicks having a bit of a party and at worst would be confronted with unpleasant sights just before bedtime so it could wait til this morning.
I’m sort of glad I made that decision as I imagine I would have slept worse if I’d seen and had to try and deal with what I’ve just found in the dark last night. I opened the little door for them to come out, having heard various cheeping but contented type noises as I approached the coop. One chicken came out, two, three, four. Ah. I came back in the house and tried to decide what to do before summoning up the courage to go and lift the side of the coop to investigate. One dead chicken (Feathers) greeted me. As the children were sitting in the lounge likely to look out the window at any moment I shut the lid again quick and came back in. Having rung Ady to ascertain he is not able to come home and deal with it and rung my Dad to find no reply I’ve dealt with the telling the children bit but am still trying to work out whether I am able to deal with the rest of it, I need something to put it in, somewhere to put it and to decide whether we want to look at the body or not before I lift the lid again. Also need to try and work out what happened and how to prevent it happening again.
I’m pretty sure it was a rat attack, we’ve seen a couple in the garden since we got the chicks and there are enough smallish gaps around the coop for one to sneak in but I’d thought the chicks were big enough now to be a match for a rat. There is no way a fox could have got in and I assume a fox would have picked off more than one chick anyway, but I guess the other four are pretty vulnerable now and I need to sort something out to ensure we don’t have a pile of corpses by this afternoon.
The children were very philosophical, no tears, just lots of reasoning that as Feathers was the weakest he wouldn’t have been able to get away from whatever it was that got in there. They decided it was very sad but as I started my chat with ‘I have something very sad to tell you but it is one of the downsides of having animals…’ they were pretty OK about it. I imagine we’ll have loads of references to it and possibly some tears later in the day.
It’s currently still pouring with rain which might well seem a fitting way to be dealing with dead creatures (I always think it is somehow ‘right’ when it rains at funerals) but I’ve about had my fill of unpleasant deeds in the rain this last week or so, so I’ll reserve the right to hang on until the rain stops before going out and dealing with it.
Cook it.
Comment by Chris — 03 July 2007 @ 9:46 am
CHRIS!!!!
Comment by t-bird — 03 July 2007 @ 12:43 pm