Who Scalped Our Hen?
October 16th, 2013 · No Comments · Posted in farming
The other day my wife and I returned home from lunch out and soon noticed something oddly missing. Through a bank of south-facing living room windows we normally have a clear view of our 30 laying hens cavorting in the yard. But as I peered out the windows, it suddenly dawned on me: The chickens were gone.
Well, not all of them. Three were circling the tractor housing our broiler chicks. I ventured out to see if I could determine why we were missing 27 birds. My heart was in my throat.
Reaching the tractor, I noticed something odd about one of the hens. It had blood all over its back. On closer inspection, I realized that what I was seeing wasn’t blood, exactly. It was the exposed muscle tissue where a large swath of skin and feathers was missing.
I had a sudden, terrible vision of marauding coyotes tearing through our flock while we were happily noshing on egg sandwiches at the local diner. But I soon discovered that wasn’t the case, either. Several of the hens were cowering under their mobile coop. Some yards away, another terrified group was huddled under the low-hanging boughs of a pine tree. Still others had secreted themselves in the grass along the sides of house. We found another two hiding under the porch outside the back door. More emerged tentatively from the wood pile.
What could have so terrified our chickens? Surely, there had been some sort of attack. But what? What sort of predator rips skin and feathers so cleanly off a hen, but fails to make dinner of her?
It occurred to us that maybe we weren’t dealing with a four-legged predator at all, but more likely something that had attacked from the air. I speculated that a hawk–or some other large raptor–had descended on the hen, grabbed with its talons, but managed only to take a scalp before flying away.
The hens continued to cower the rest of the day, as well as the day after. Even two days later, they ventured away from their coop only warily, and many spent their days squatting under the chassis.
Our ornithologist friend Jared was surprised to hear of such a hawk attack. “Usually,” he said, “the hawk wins.” But he said raptors are migrating this time of year. “It might have been a young one that didn’t really know what it was doing.”
The injured hen, meanwhile, has been confined to intensive care in the coop vacated by our Guinea fowl keets. She has her own feeder and waterer and seems to be doing fine. Apparently, losing a chunk of skin and feathers off your back is not life threatening in the chicken world. But we want to keep her separate from the other hens, who might take her injury as an invitation to peck her to death.
Meanwhile, our eyes are peeled, scanning the sky for any more unwanted visitors.
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