A hen’s near death experience

Jake and I almost killed one of our hens.

It happened right before we left town for Christmas. I had made the mistake of allowing the hens out of their fenced enclosure to scamper around our deep, snow-covered yard. The problem is, I have since discovered, chickens don’t really like snow….deep snow especially. They can’t walk across it without sinking in it like quicksand.

You’re probably thinking, “N-Doh” right? Well, this thought didn’t occur to me until I saw a group of five hens standing forlornly outside of their enclosure, blankly looking into space as if wondering what strange new world they inhabited that seemed to pull their legs deeper into its powdery depths.

They seemed to be stuck.  I gently approached, thinking that perhaps they would allow me to pick them up one by one and walk them back to the safety of their hen hut.

Yeah, right.

I knelt down to scoop up the white one.  But she battered her wings in my face and half flew/ran to the far edge of our property and hid under a row of scraggly-looking trees. She stood perfectly still. I moved closer, but she flew even further away. Evidently, my assistance was not welcome.

I looked at my cell phone. It was 3 o’clock. I figured this pissed-off hen still had plenty of time to make her way back to the coop before dusk, the time of day when chickens instinctively roost for the evening.  So I let her be. I let all the chickens be. I headed back to the house, muttering “you ungrateful little bee-atches” under my breath.

That night at about 8 o’clock, I headed back to the hen hut to lock them in for the night, a necessary precaution to keep predators outside and the chickens inside, but when I did a count, I only counted 30 chickens. We have 31. I counted again, but still came up short.

I pointed my flashlight to the row of trees the white hen had hid under. I aimed the light higher and saw her little white body perched about 30 feet off the ground, nestled high up in in a thick nest of spindly branches. I have no idea how she managed to fly that high considering HER WINGS ARE CLIPPED. But there she was, her eyes half-closed in an attempt to sleep, or to keep the light from my flashlight out of her eyes.

It was 17 degrees….bitterly cold. I knew she couldn’t stay out there or she might freeze to death. Or a raccoon, expert tree climbers that they are, might get her. So I went and got Jake and told him what happened. He grabbed a long pole and we headed back to the trees. Our aim was to knock her out of the tree and grab her before she had a chance to fly away again. But she was so high up, the pole wasn’t long enough to knock her off her perch. At one point, I even got on Jake’s shoulders and tried to knock her off, Jake stumbling to maintain his ground beneath me. But instead of knocking her DOWN, I somehow managed to knock her even higher into the tree. She was now about 35-40 feet off the ground. It was really cold. We didn’t know what else to do. So…..we left her there and said that we’d try to rouse her using a ladder first thing in the morning.

That night in bed, we were both kept awake by guilt intermixed with the biting chill in the air.

“I shouldn’t have allowed them out of their fenced yard with all this snow on the ground,” I said.

“We shouldn’t have left her up in the tree,” Jake said. “We’re not being good stewards of our animals.”

“Word.”

“She might freeze to death,” he said. “Or a raccoon will get her.”

Early the next morning, I ran down to the hen hut to see if she had wandered back on her own. I half expected to see her loitering outside of the hut. But she was nowhere to be found. I looked in the tree. Nothing. No feathers on the ground. I looked everywhere for her. She was gone. A raccoon got her. I counted the rest of the chickens. There were still only 30.

The next day we had to leave town for the Christmas weekend. I did a final count before we hit the road, and there were still only 30 chickens.

“This is not good animal husbandry,” Jake said. “We should have got her. One way or the other, we should have got her.”

“And now a raccoon somewhere has a taste for chicken meat,” I said.

We were gone for 4 days, and returned late last night. Our neighbor Sandra was kind enough to watch the birds for us in our absence.

When we got home at about 9 pm last night, I walked down to the hen hut with my flashlight and did another count, half expecting to find 29 chickens. Maybe 28. 27?

But no…..I counted 31 chickens.

The hen had somehow come back. She wasn’t dead! She managed to disappear, embark on a vision quest, or whatever, and come back all on her own when she was good and ready…..sometime over the weekend.

I still can’t believe one of our hapless hens was able to survive “in the wild” all on her own.

That was as close to a Christmas miracle as I think I’ll ever get.

This calls for a celebration of eggs.