Very early yesterday morning I see my neighbor- let’s call him Russ- and had a conversation that goes a little like this:
Russ says, “I got one! It done attacked a chicken that was far away from the hen house”
“What? A Raccoon?”
“Yessir, last night. Didn’t you hear them gun shots? They were right by your open window last night.”
“What? No. We didn’t hear anything. We were asleep.”
“HOOOO WEEEE I shot about 15 times with my .22! You two sleep pretty darn heavy!”
“What happened to the chicken?”
“Dunno. It didn’t sound like it would have survived, though. It was super gnarls”, says Russ.
So I go looking for the hen or at least her remains, and to my surprise I find her right away in plain sight laying in the middle of the lawn. I couldn’t see her legs, but she was obviously still alive because she was staring at me and doing a little chicken growl. I walk up to her and as I lean down to check her wounds to see why she can’t get up, she all of a sudden jumps up at me and starts pecking. Then I head a bunch of little peeps and saw that she was sitting on 3 day old baby chicks. She protected her babies from the raccoon in the night! She had a bunch of feathers all around her from where the raccoon attacked her, but she seemed just fine. It was truly amazing to see a mother hen take such good care of her chicks. Usually when a raccoon attacks it’s very ugly, but this chicken fought it off.
That’s what I call a good chicken.
