Persistence

My dad whipped up a nice little chicken run Sunday and Monday, with green, plastic hawk netting stuff over the top.

Today, I discovered that the hawk netting is quite high quality. The hawk came again. I was going to feed the chickens some bread and lettuce... I looked out the window, and the stupid bird was sitting on top of the hawk netting, trying to poke its head inside. The three chickens were huddled under the bush like... well, like three chickens huddled under a bush.

So I barged my way past the screen door and took off across the lawn again, yelling obscenities fluently. The hawk gave me a rather annoyed look, hopped up to the place where the neighbor's fence joins ours, then flew off into a tree. (It later departed the yard when I started prowling around said tree with a big ol' stick in my hand.)

I'm not sure what to do; federal law or something endangered whatever protects hawks in general, and I never intended to kill one, anyways. The hawk can't be blamed for trying to feed itself, but still. I wish it would stop trying to eat KFC (Kelly's Freaked-Out Chickens).

On the bright side, it's a good thing we got that hawk netting up. Otherwise, we would almost certainly have suffered another loss.

Every five minutes, I get paranoid all over again and have to run over to the window to check on the chickies.

Similarities and Differences

Although Coco flew away last Thursday, I had to wait until today before I could even bother myself with writing anything about it. I sat down and wrote the last post, and this one, out in one go.

Coco was a beautiful bird, and I saved several of her feathers because their patterns were so unique.

I thought I would never see her feathers again. I thought I would never see her again, half running, half flying across the yard when she knew there were treats.

And yet, today I took a look at Qwerty's feathers. Her wing and tail feathers are a solid, oily black, but the smaller feathers have the same pattern as Coco's did. They were black and white, like a Xerox copy of the original, but they still had that same beauty.

Coco, being a "mixed-breed hen," has what I discovered is a rather common coloring. I've already met two "Coco look-alikes" so far. What I noticed is that Coco is generally darker and slimmer than her little doppelgangers. So very similar, yet so very different.

There are plenty of hens out there with brownish-gray feathers, spots and stripes, but only one of them was my Coco.

Brown Hawk, Brown Hen

Thursday, October 10th, 2013.

I got home and went out to check on the chickens. It was about four in the afternoon.

The chickens are molting, so they look quite horrible. Well, Qwerty looks the most hideous with most of her feathers missing, but Snowflake started a bit earlier and is pretty much feathered out again. Swan and Coco are going at their own pace. They've all lost a bit of weight (or a lot of weight, in some cases), but they refuse to eat, except for Snowflake. I'm not too worried about that, because when they're done molting, I'll plump them back up a bit to "restock" them with protein and minerals.

So anyways, they were all grouped around one of the runtier rosebushes, just doing their chicken thing. I fed them some grass and went back inside.

Fast forward a few hours. After dinner, I went back outside to check on them and lock them into the coop for the night if they were all ready. I poked my head halfway into the coop, but only Qwerty was inside. She was huddled in one of the old nestboxes that they don't use anymore, and when she saw me, she came out and started making little whining noises. I picked her up and stood back up, thinking that this was just one of those "We don't wanna go to bed yet" days.

All of a sudden, Qwerty started making quiet but frantic clucking noises. I honestly thought she was just freaking out because a songbird had strayed too close to her, but when I looked up, there was a bird of prey (I thought a hawk, but what do I know? They're not chickens...) calmly sitting on a pile of brownish-gray feathers. (It was sitting only a few feet away from where my grandmother was standing in the yard, so it must have had some nerve to stay there.)

I completely lost it. I don't remember what I did with Qwerty, but I think I set her down. One moment I was completely shocked at what I saw across the yard, and the next, I was Qwerty-less and sprinting there as fast as I could.

"COCO!!!" I shouted. The hawk tensed, and I screamed at it to get the f*** out of my yard. So it did. It flapped away to sit on the neighbor's roof/fence area.

I ran back inside the house and tried to articulate what I thought I had just seen. Somehow, my mom actually understood me, so we ran back out to herd the other three chickens into the coop. We locked them in.

I actually became conscious of the fact that the stupid hawk was still sitting there like it was waiting for another chicken. I screamed at it some more, so it flew to the other neighbor's roof and sat there until it decided it was time to admit defeat.

It was far too late for Coco, so we wrapped her up and buried her in the front yard, next to my two elderly parakeets. Sylvester and Blueberry and Coco.

Even now, I still can't shake the feeling that I'm dreaming about it. Every day I wake up and look outside for my beautiful bird. Every day I will miss her, for weeks and months and years.

Coco, I hope you know I love you, and I'll never, ever forget you.

Hello Again

I know I haven't posted since... one molt ago. The blog just turned into one of those things where you think you can maintain it, but you find that you can't be bothered to set aside a good chunk of time to sit down and write something and wrestle with the formatting. In other words, a burden.

However, I am going to try again with this whole thing, but the updates may be few and far between.

Stay tuned!