It turns out that chickens are sort of difficult to keep alive. Besides being rather dumb, or possibly because they are rather dumb, pretty much everything preys on them.
Successfully.
All that to say: one of our newest chickens was killed on Saturday by a hawk. We were home, it was the middle of the day, we had just come home from the store as a family and the kids were at the table for lunch. My husband saw the hawk swoop on down and attack our largest chicken. The mistake it made was trying to drag the chicken under the chicken wire of the chicken run. The now-no-longer-with-us chicken got stuck and the hawk abandoned it. The hawk flew up onto a nearby telephone pole and watched from afar. After a while, it gave up and went away.
We learned that there was no way to process the chicken for food. I know that seems cruel, but…it seemed like such a waste to bury a chicken that was otherwise untouched. Not that I eat chicken — I don’t eat meat except for fish. The rest of the family does. Still, there was nothing else we could do, we buried it. In the backyard. Well, I didn’t — Christian did.
I tell you this just to inform you of our ongoing chicken journey.