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.