I was in my office when I heard a chicken-oriented struggle. One of our favorite chickens, Lizzie, had gone missing a day or two before, so this was confirmation that she hadn’t just wandered off. Lizzie was a sweet chicken. She was more interested in taking care of eggs and raising new roosters than she was in eating sometimes. She was goofy looking and I’m sad that she’s gone. Sadder still that her last moments were probably pretty scary. 

She didn’t deserve that. 

I ran down from my office in my underwear, my flash light was on the fritz so I was a flashing flittering bit of swearing bearing down on what was likely a fox, they were gone by the time I got there. The other chickens were clucking and scared in the coop from which Quincy, one of our roosters, had been dragged. They all stuck close together today.

This automatic chicken door didn’t shut properly when we first bought it. Wood chips and other things’d get jammed up in the tracks and it would remain open all night. Some fox got wind of this and by the time we figured out what was going on several hens had been killed. This happened again and I don’t really know why. I fixed the door before by trimming the rail, but it jammed for a few nights. Knocking it around a bit appears to have fixed it, but I’m tired of losing hens that don’t deserve to be lost. 

I suppose I could wait out with a gun and kill whatever it is that’s getting my hens, like I said it’s probably a fox. It might be a coyote, I don’t think it’s a weasle, it could be a fisher cat. I don’t want to kill any of those things. So instead I’m going to check the door each night before bed and build a proper enclosure for the birds this summer, once the ground’s soft enough to bury posts. 

I’d rather build a fence than kill something. 
The fox got a rooster we were planning on killing this weekend, we already have plenty of stock and that animal’s got to eat too. It’d be a shame to punish them for being hungry.