Bye Sis...

Yeah, we lost our little buff cochin bantam hen, who was the surviving identical twin of the pair we called The Chicken Sisters. While they were both alive we just called them The Chicken Sisters (after one of my daughter's books) since they were freakin' identical and we could NOT tell them apart. They did everything together--ate, slept, foraged during them day--even brooded some baby chicks together! They were never more than about 6 inches apart and did that weird twin 'making the same movements at the same time' thing.

As they got older they naturally tapered off laying eggs. The first twin died of natural causes back in 2006, of old age we thought. We had gotten them as adults back in 2001, I figured they were at LEAST 1-2 years old then, and they were wild little girls, too. Amiable enough, but NOT lap chickens and hard to catch, and bitched a blue streak when you DID catch them. Never mean to their flockmates or us, though.

When the first twin died we expected that Sis, which is what we took to calling the surviving Sister, would miss her, but we weren't sure how much. She obviously mourned and missed her sister, but handled it well enough.

Since then she's kept to herself, and has been the grand old dignified dame of the flock. Then suddenly in 2008 she came into lay again, laying eggs for a few weeks, cavorting shamelessly with the boys and earning herself a trip to the vet for egg binding when she got one stuck. She was too old for that nonsense, and we told her so. We did manage to successfully incubate and hatch two of her eggs, however, and she has one daughter still with us today from 2008.

We've had her in the last couple of days since it's been so ungodly hot, and she was clearly suffering from the heat. We knew she was on her way out--she wasn't sick, just old and worn out, poor sweetie. Last night she went peacefully in her sleep.

We'll miss you, Sis.

Another One Gone...

Tonight I took a beak count at dusk and discovered one of our little banty hens missing.

It was Honkey, the daughter of our oldest hen, a buff Cochin bantam named Sis, who just happened to lay a couple of eggs at the age of 8 years old in 2008. Since I didn't have any chicks from her and REALLY wanted some, I incubated the eggs and successfully hatched two baby chicks--both cute little hens, one named Potato and the other Honkey.

Honkey apparantly sat under the Forsythia bush tonight and peacefully passed away.

I can't find any obvious reason. She was in perfect health, had eaten, was nice and fat, and didn't struggle as she went. I'm inclined to think it was either just one of those things that happen, or the advanced age of her mother might have been a factor.

She was a very sweet little hen, friendly and eager to hang around her humans. We'll miss her a lot.

Here she is as a chick, taking a flying ninja leap at her hatchmate brother as they played in the living room back in July 2008.

We lost her sister, Potato, in January due to an accident. This last year has been a really, really bad one for losing chickens.

Juliette...

...has left us. Peacefully and quietly in J.'s arms this morning. She was very old and we had known that it was going to happen soon, as she was getting slower and weaker. We've had her in the house every night for the last two weeks because we didn't want her to have to push and shove for a roosting spot with the other chickens. She had gotten more and more weak and frail.

Juliette came from a 'Chicken Hell' feed store back in 2002, and she was at least 1-2 years old then--so that would have made her somewhere between 8-10 years old--not bad for a tiny bantam. She was terrified of people and very wild for several years, screaming horribly whenever we had to catch her for anything or would attempt to touch her. Then in the last year she had suddenly mellowed, and had begun hanging out with us, even coming into the house on her own, accepting goodies from our hands and allowing us to pet her and pick her up. She even decided that 'This is GREAT' and would come in and hang out with us as we sat at our computers, sitting in our lap and being petted for long periods of time. It was quite rewarding seeing an abused animal forgive and find peace like that.

I hope we at least gave her a good life and maybe attoned for what she had suffered to make her hate and fear people so. Juliette was the tiniest chicken I'd ever seen and was a special girl.

A lot of our hens are getting quite old, so this year and next I expect we'll have another round of the aging girls passing away.

Another One Is Making A Graceful Exit...

This time it's Juliette. Here she is in 2002, the day we first got her. 

She was a bit skinny, but filled out nicely to a glowingly healthy little girl. Here she is again, three years later.

Juliette is a VERY tiny, Old English Bantam hen that we rescued back in 2002, along with Houdini (who passed away recently) from a feed store that was a Hell for chickens. We'd stopped by the place in the middle of a week-long, 100 degree heat wave and found ALL of the chickens there with empty food and water dishes at 1PM--and the water dishes were hours old, bone dry. The lone teenage clerk was chatting on the phone, so we grabbed a couple of the bottled waters they were selling at $1.00 a pop and went around with them ourselves, filling up the chickens' water dishes. The poor birds were scrambling to GUZZLE the water out of the bottles before it even hit the dishes, poor things. We came home with Juliette and Houdini that day, and reported the feed store. Both she and Houdini were adults at that time, so Juliette is at least 9 years old, possibly more. Both of them were VERY wild and hated humans, so we had our work cut out for us--over the years, if we had to grab them for some reason, they would struggle and scream like they were dying. Juliette was especially bad.

About a year ago Juliette suddenly decided that she really LIKED us, and would hang out by the house, even allowing me to lean down and pet her! She'd talk and chirp happily the whole time, making no attempt at all to walk away. She would even calmly walk into the house to tool around for a bit and visit. It's like she just suddenly decided that we were OK after all.

When chickens get very old but are healthy, what usually happens is that their internal organs begin to fail. When I opened the coop this morning, Juliette was the last one out, waddling tiredly out to stand next to me at the door. I picked her up and felt the tell-tale abdominal bulge that meant she was retaining fluid, and knew her liver must be failing. The same thing happened to Houdini towards the end of last year, and our vet confirmed it and put her on Lasix to help her pass the fluid and be more comfortable until she went. It worked quite well and Houdini passed quietly on New Year's Eve.

So we brought Juliette in and gave her a dose of Lasix (we were lucky enough to have a few pills on hand) and a bunch of mealworms. She appreciated the bugs but not the icky pill.

We put her back outside with her flock, but J. brought her in this afternoon--she had gone off into a corner of the yard but chirped at him in such a way that sounded like she was scared. So he brought her in to hold her and keep her company, petting her and offering her tidbits that she didn't have to compete for with the other chickens. We're going to keep her in overnight so she doesn't have to compete for a roosting spot or have to jump up onto a roost.

So right now she's dozing in a sunny spot by the back door, and she's got a little chicken buffet thing going with chicken food, water, corn on the cob kernels, mashed strawberry and hard boiled egg yolk. When dusk falls we'll make her a comfy littke chicken bed and place her in the living room so she can watch TV and have company.

We don't know how much longer she'll be with us--heck, it could be anywhere from hours to months. But we'll do our best to make her happy and try to make up for her time in Chicken Hell at the hands of humans.

Leaving In Style

Houdini, our little unknown breed hen who we got from a feed store in August of 2002 as an adult, just left us. We knew she was old, and that tonight was going to be the night.

In typical Houdini style, she left us peacefully in her sleep on the stroke of midnight, surrounded by everyone celebrating and lots of noise and fireworks.

The old lady knew how to make an exit.

Goodbye, Mary...

Mary Travers died today. Mary was part of the 60's singing group, 'Peter, Paul & Mary'. Their album was the first one I remember singing along with as a kid, it actually belonged to one of my older sisters. We played it over and over...

Their music heavily influenced my singing, although I knew I could never hope to have a voice as pure and soaring as Mary's. My favorite part of her modern performances of 'Puff The Magic Dragon' was when she changed the ending chorus up a bit, making sure to call out, 'Present tense!' and instead of singing, 'lived by the sea', made it 'lives by the sea'. Like Puff, Mary will never truly die.

Thanks Mary, you are much appreciated and missed.

Death

Marek's Disease has struck our flock of chickens and devastated them. We've lost 7 hens since March, 5 of whom died in the last 4 weeks--one each week except this week, when we lost two, Bridgette and Loretta. All of the 7 were young, adult hens under the age of three who were perfectly healthy otherwise. Sadly, Bridgette was one of the ex-battery hens that we had adopted, hoping to give her a better life.

Loretta died in my arms about 5 hours ago.

Marek's is a horrible disease, viral in nature and ultra-common with no treatment or cure. It tends to strike chickens from the age of chicks up to about 4 years, and it's so prevalent that they say if you've got chickens, you've got Marek's in your flock. Birds go from 'fine' to dead in 3-4 days. Older birds are usually immune to it, having had time to build up an immunity. I figure it came in this year in the Spring crop of wild birds, which hang around the back yard. Nothing can be done to keep them out. There is a vaccine available online, but you have to order it timed to coincide with your hatch because it doesn't last for more than a few days and must be administered immediately. And the lack of avian vets around here, especially for chickens, means that no vets have it on hand, either.

Our only course of action is to watch the chickens like a hawk, and immediately isolate any that look even REMOTELY ill. We have 13 young hens that are at risk from Marek's right now, all the rest are at least 5 years old and so should be safe. The younger they are, the more at risk they are. So far the babies from last year and the baby chicks that are now 7 weeks old are fine, but we are supposed to turn the 6 week olds out into the flock for good in one week. I don't know how that's going to go, we're going to have to play it by ear...

Things REALLY suck right now, I'm quite frustrated and depressed. I've spent days combing the Internet and my bird books for anything and everything I can read on Marek's, but it's no use.

Maggie Is Dead...

...thanks to my vet of 10 years. She had a straightforward oral fungus growth in her mouth, which his office seemingly deliberately undermedicated--we'd run out of the medication in 3 days (normal course of treatment for something like this is 7-14 days), they'd make us come BACK in for another office visit + more medication. Rinse, repeat, repeat... Five visits & charges in less than 10 days. The last bottle of medication he cut her dose by 3/4 and we STILL ran out in 6 days, so she never had a chance. It's all about money, I guess. They've succeeded in draining my bank account AND killing their patient.

Maggie suffered horribly with this crap and died of starvation, despite me handfeeding her night and day.

Good job, guys.

Enjoy your correspondence from the licensing board.

Stress...

My father-in-law is in the hospital, again. This time he's in ICU, unresponsive, after having been taken in because of high ammonia levels in his blood. So his kidneys/liver are failing...also, they suspect he suffered a stroke.

He was prepared after last month's hospital stay, and his living will, DNR and other papers are all set up and signed. I'm hoping I can sneak N. in to see him, as I think her talking to him may do him some good...you never know.

Good & Bad...

Good: One of the eggs in the incubator is pipping, 48 hours early! Hopefully the chick is formed enough to survive, and we're working on moving the cam over to the incubator & off the 25 day old chicks. There are 50 eggs in this batch, and candling the other day showed that some were clear (never developed), some had shells too dark to tell, and others had dark masses inside that meant chicks--alive or dead, we cannot tell.

We're back to Stickam for this hatch:

http://www.stickam.com/chickam2008

Bad: We just lost one of our favorite hens, Beast, to some damned mystery illness that stumped us, our fellow chicken owner friends, AND our vet. Best he could say was that he thought it was something bacterial in nature. Seems no amount of Lasix and Baytril could save her, and the best I could do was to pet her, talk to her and be with her as she went. Meanwhile, Louise and Houdini, who caught it first and were deathly ill, have recovered and are fine.

This is extra depressing since yesterday Beast had turned a corner and was walking around the house, talking and eating up a storm on her own, we felt we just needed to fatten her up a bit and she'd be fine. :(

EDIT:  We later realized that we had had a sudden infestation of weird black & orange caterpillars on our Curly Willow tree several days before the hens got ill.  We knocked them down for the chickens, and only three hens had actually eaten any...Beast, who ate the most, and Louise and Houdini.

So yeah, poison caterpillars, it seems.

Goodbye Carla

My sister Carla.

She passed away very unexpectedly on December 22, 2007 and her memorial service was held on January 5th, 2008--on what would have been her 59th birthday.

I've spent so much time crying and feeling restless and numb, that I don't know what household duties and 'things to do' I've missed or forgotten. I'll start to do something, then wander off and forget about it midway through. Most nights I don't sleep, because the minute it's quiet, with nothing left to do but go to bed, as soon as I lay down, my mind starts running over what happened. I'll lay there for a bit and invariably start crying again, then get up and go out into the living room so I won't keep J. awake. I turn on the TV, because anything is better than just sitting there rehashing her death and how horrible the world is going to be without her. Any distraction helps.

Carla and her husband avoided dying in a fire that burned their home to the ground on December 13th. They weren't home when it happened, and the house that they built themselves burned to the ground along with everything they owned. I spoke to Carla for the last time on December 19th, when she called to thank me for a Target gift card and some money I sent her to try and help replace some of what they had lost in the fire. She told me that they were moving into a furnished condo, provided by their insurance company, in two days. She seemed as chipper as she could be in such circumstances, and had a slight cold. She had epilepsy for many years but had not had a seizure in several years, and was on medication for it. She even joked about the nickname they had come up for their burned-out house--'Ash Manor' or some such. I wish I could remember what it was, because typical Carla, it was as funny as Hell. Before I hung up, she promised to call on Friday with the new telephone number at the condo. I felt better knowing that I'd talk to her again in two days.

Two days later I got a call from my oldest sister, telling me that Carla had suffered an epileptic seizure that day, and had fallen in such a way that her airflow had been obstructed and she had quit breathing. By the time it was discovered and help arrived for her, she was already gone. They had resuscitated her, but she was in the hospital ICU on a respirator and had not regained consciousness.

She died the following day. My brother was already on his way to our mom's house in Northern California, where he would escort her to Idaho. They decided to continue on to Idaho anyway to see if they could do anything for Carla's husband.

Between Christmas that was just a couple of days away and a massive winter storm that had descended on Idaho, it was a miracle that my brother and my mom even got there. There simply wasn't an available airline seat for me, and had they waited until there was, it would have caused needless delay. I hated not being there but felt it was more important to get my mom there quickly.

Right now I'm flip-flopping between sadness, loss, guilt and anger. The guilt comes from the fact that rather than send money and call, I should have made the trip up there to help her get settled in her new place...I had the time, since my daughter N. was off school for the holidays, I had the money...and lastly, I've been trained in CPR for almost 30 years now. If only I'd been there, I possibly could have revived her and kept her going till the paramedics got there.

I suppose all this will get better in time, I don't know. I guess, in a way our family has been pretty lucky--the only other family member to die was my father, back in 1981.

I have so many great memories of Carla. Spending a day with her and her husband was better than going to Disneyland for us kids, they were so much fun. Carla introduced me to old books (and used bookstores), Steinbeck, vintage children's books, old movies, cult movies, anything and everything quirky and weird, antiques--too many things to count, which I continue to love. She was a guiding force in our childhood, always fun and loving but at the same time witty and clever--everyones favorite.

When I was little they tell me that I couldn't pronounce her name, so I called her 'La La'.

Goodbye La La, I love you.

We Desperately Need Your Help! But Not Really...

My daughter's elementary school saddens me.

During the year, they have various events such as field trips, science fairs, student art shows, etc. The school is forever clamoring and whining in their weekly newsletter for more parent help and participation. The school secretary and principal are very vocal in person about this as well, and VERY few people step forward--maybe 3-4 parents in the entire school.

Well, I'm a stay-at-home mom because of my various chronic injury problems, so I offer to help the school however and wherever I can. I've volunteered as a Kindergarten helper, gone on field trips, taken yearbook photos, done things around the school, all with no problems.

The school has an event every year at this time to promote reading, where they invite kids and parents to come out for an evening of books read aloud and a take away dinner (hot dogs, tacos, etc.) to eat picnic style on the grass. We loved it when we went when N. was in Kindergarten two years ago, and I volunteered to be a reader last year. Unfortunately I contracted pneumonia and was unable to do it, which really crushed me. I love reading with a passion, and J. and I have read to N. every day since she was born. As a result, she loves reading as well, and is well beyond her grade level in reading and comprehension. This year, the event is next Friday, and back at the beginning of this year I once again volunteered. Both the principal and the school secretary were appreciative and very eager for help, they said, "Sure! The more the merrier, fantastic!". So I got the green light months ago and I was all excited about it--books ready to go and no goddamn pneumonia this time. I had popped into the office a few times over the year to remind the secretary that I was still interested in it. I checked in again with her two weeks ago so I wouldn't forget the date. Book nerd that I am, I've literally been waiting all year for this.

The school secretary just called me to let me know I couldn't join in.

Apparantly, one of the teachers who is in charge, got upset and feels that it should be a 'teachers only' event. That was the only explanation given and I got the distinct impression that there was more going on under the surface, if you know what I mean. It's almost like she wanted to keep all her toys and not share. I think this particular teacher may have some control issues as well...

I feel like I've been dis-invited to a party. Why in God's name would you tell someone for months that your participation would be wonderful, and then with a week to go tell them not to come? Sad that the school constantly clamors for more money and parent participation, then at the last minute, spits in the eye of one of the few people who consistently volunteer.

Well...Hell, here are the books I was going to read:

Edward The Emu by Sheena Knowles
Edwina The Emu by Sheena Knowles
Don't Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus! by Mo Willems
Cook A Doodle Do by Janet Stevens
The Story Of Ferdinand by Munro Leaf
Pinduli by Janell Canon
Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin
Raoul The Owl by Louis Untermeyer

I had a little audience participation thing for the kids all planned and everything. I so would have loved to share these wonderful books.

Damn, She Was One Of My Favorites.

Rita in the back, Poof photobombing in on the left.

Rita was a feisty, headstrong little Cochin/Jersey Giant mix that we hatched ourselves back in 2003. She was one of my favorites and whenever I sat down out back, would come RUNNING over as fast as she could waddle (cochins aren't built for speed) to sit in my lap--and woe betide any other chicken that wanted equal lap time! Rita would warn them off right away. She would sit in my lap for as long as I would let her, and complained loudly when I set her down again. Often I'd have Rita on one knee, Babs on the other--Babs was a gift from a sibling's household, and Babs thinks she is still a baby chick and insists on sitting on your lap with her head rammed in your armpit--under your wing, as it were.

Rita had a habit of at the last minute, sticking her head into pictures we tried to take of the other chickens. The end result was like bad vacation snapshots, photobomb city. So it's kind of fitting that in the photo above, Poof is doing it to her.

Rita died yesterday. I don't even know what killed her. Granted, it was nearly 100 degrees yesterday, our first really hot day this year. I had gone out like I always do on hot days to hose off the chickens and yard to keep things cooler for the animals. I had gone out at 8:30AM, 10:30AM and 12:30PM. Everything was fine. I even stopped to talk to her and pet her and all was well. At 2PM when I went again to hose things off, we found her in the coop, sitting in the corner as if to lay an egg and breathing a bit hard. Since she was distressed (we thought by the heat), we brought her in to cool off. She died less than 5 minutes later. She had been eating, drinking and carrying on normally up until then. I don't know what's worse--having an animal get ill and die slowly or go quickly like that.

Rita was one of those animals that 'picked out her human'--she chose ME as her favorite human first, not the other way around. Rita's mother, Elizabeth, is elderly but still with us, and Rita's daughter, Skitters, is twice as feisty and psycho as Rita ever was. Even Moet, our very elderly Frizzle Cochin who was Rita's foster mama, is still with us.

This is Rita as a baby, back in 2003.

Last night when I went out to sit with the chickens in the evening, Rita's mother, Liz, jumped up in my lap and sat with me a while.

She's never done that before. I appreciated it.

Two Went This Time...

We lost two of our hens this week, two days apart.

Helen

Cutie

It was sheer coincidence that they both fell ill at the same time, with two seperate problems. Usually we can dampen or even cure most chicken ailments with our arsenal of preparations, books and online help from friends. This time we knew it was time to take them to the vet, so we did.

It wasn't good news.

Helen had Proventriculitis. It's an inflammation or blockage of the proventriculus (stomach) of a bird. Sometimes you can nail down a cause such as an obvious blockage or a mycotoxin, but usually it's cause is a frustrating mystery; which was true in Helens' case. She got sick and died within two days, and the vet told us surgery was not an option, just to take her home and make her comfortable. He gave us meds to try just in case, he's a softie when it comes to chickens. Helen was the only daughter of Jack, our beloved Barred Rock rooster of many years. She was a very calm girl except at feeding time, when she would YELL. She has a brother, Phoenix, who is currently our Head Rooster.

The other hen was Cutie. Cutie was so named because she habitually would look up at you with a cute little tilt to her head, as in her picture. Cutie contracted a fungal condition known as Favus, which caused her face to start peeling. It was several days before we could nail down what was going on, but both Cutie and Helen were given antibiotics and an antifungal from the vet. Despite our dosing them and handfeeding them every 30 minutes, Helen died on Friday and Cutie died last night. The were hatchmates, we hatched them in 2003.

I love having the chickens, but it is so hard when they die. It's especially worrisome to have two seemingly healthy birds go so quickly, and have to now worry about the others.

Lily Passes

Lily was my Valentine's Day present in 2006. To heck with flowers, say it with chickens! She was a stunning adult white Sultan hen who was suffering from a VERY bad respiratory infection when we got her, doubly dangerous for a crested breed. She had to stay in the house for several weeks on antibiotics until it had cleared, but was obviously the worse for it and was never strong. She had no concept of getting the heck out of the way and tended to look a little too much like a pair of sweatsocks when she plonked herself down in the middle of the floor. Lily was very sweet and loving towards humans, but jealous of other chickens. Lily had her own idea of where she ranked in the pecking order and it was near the TOP, thank you. She 'talked' and chewed her words just like a Siamese cat. And Lily talked CONSTANTLY.

Lily picked fights with most of the other chickens, the roos included. Nothing serious, just enough to get the point across not to EVER mess with her. Because of this Lily ended up spending most of her time alone, and was having a bit of trouble coming to the horrible realization that she must now sleep in the coop with those other chicken-things. Instead, she always wanted to be in the house and at dusk when it was time to close up the coop, we'd find her waiting politely but a tad impatiently on the back porch for one of those idiot humans to open the door and let her in. Lily never really realized she was a chicken, and just decided to refuse to believe that particular nasty rumor.

We will miss her, she was only with us for two months but we just loved how special and unique she was.

Goodbye, darlin' Lil.

Goodbye, Jack...

Well, just to keep the depression going, we unexpectedly lost Jack, our 8 year old Barred Rock rooster last night. He and Wild Child were a couple, the grand old couple of the flock. He died suddenly but quietly in his sleep less than 24 hours after Wild Child went, and we buried him right next to Wild Child in a bed of roses just like hers.  He had been clearly distressed and depressed, searching for her...I think if it's possible to die from a broken heart, Jack just may have.

The rest of the flock is mostly standing around staring at each other or wandering aimlessly about the yard in clumps. They look at each other as if to say, "Well, what do we do now?" In two short days they have lost their father, protector and lover in Jack, and their mother, matriarch and guardian in Wild Child. The flock dynamic has been thrown into turmoil with no clear successors to either the Head Roo or Head Hen posts.

We are trying to keep them company as much as we can. When we go out into the yard they group around us more than they normally do, even the normally more standoffish birds. I'm trying to adjust to the loss of two long-time and well-loved pets. Anyone who has ever had an older pet, no matter what kind, knows how incredibly cool and laid-back they are to have around. I also can't help but look at the others and wonder who is next. Several of our chickens are older and recent events have left me gun-shy, trying to steel myself to finding another dead bird. It's no fun.

Jack was our household symbol. We use his image and his name in our email, our Internet dealings...so many things. Emotionally I'm a train wreck, but that is, indeed, the cost of keeping pets. It's just hard when such a big bill comes due all at once.

This has not been a good week.

Wild Child Passes

Well, we have lost another one.

This time it was our flock's Head Hen, a lovely Silver Laced Wyandotte with the clunky and graceless name of Wild Child. She gained that name nearly ten years ago when we brought her and her two sisters home from the feed store. Then they were tiny, day and a half old baby chicks with their egg tooth still attached. For those that don't know, on birds the egg tooth is the small, hard tip of their beaks that assists them in breaking out of their shells when they hatch. It falls off within the first three days of life.

The reason she was named Wild Child was because we had given the three chicks temporary names to help us tell the new arrivals apart from each other. We figured that we would come up with real names for the chicks shortly. 'Wild Child' was what we called her since she was a very boisterous chick, running around and jumping on her sisters' heads when they weren't looking.

Unfortunately for her, the name stuck. So Wild Child she became for good and all.

Wild Child naturally took on the position of Head Hen--she can peck everyone else but no one pecks her, she is leader of the flock. She is the one in my previous posts that climbed up on top of the coop, couldn't get down and had to call us out in the yard to rescue her. She was the one who would call out and alert us to trouble in the yard.

The day before yesterday we noticed that Wild Child was refusing food and simply standing, eyes closed, in the shade under her favorite bush. Yesterday was the same, so we knew that something was up and strongly suspected that she was making her exit. She wasn't sick, just old.

I brought her into the house around 3PM and offered her a small dish of goodies, which she looked at but politely shook her head, refusing. Now when a chicken won't eat, something is wrong. Her body temperature had also fallen. I wrapped her in a bath towel and sat with her on my lap for the next 5 1/2 hours, gently stroking her head and talking to her as she slept. I had mixed up a small amount of baby bird handfeeding formula with some other things, and this I gave her with an eyedropper every 45 minutes to keep her comfortable and hydrated. Around 7PM I had gotten up to stretch my legs and as I walked by the back door, I noticed that every single chicken of our flock had crammed themselves up onto the back porch, something they had never done.  Jack, our Head Roo, was in front, looking at me and waiting.  I knew what they wanted and opened the back door so that they could come in and visit Wild Child, which they did quietly and one at a time before filing out again.

Over the final several hours Wild Child got quieter and quieter and we knew the time was near. Finally it was 8PM and my daughter's bedtime. She gently petted Wild Child and told her goodnight and goodbye.

Not two minutes later Wild Child gave a single flap of her wings and died.

We'll miss her. Today the other chickens are wandering about looking lost, Jack is especially distressed. She would have been 10 years old this coming April and was the cornerstone, guardian, mother, flock representative, disciplinarian and matriarch of the flock. She led the group out of the coop in the morning and called them to roost in the evening.

When you have a pet for that many years they are a member of your family, no matter what kind of animal they are. They become as much a part as your personality and entangled in your family history as any other member of your household.

Our most affectionate farewell to Wild Child.

Goodbye, Mrs. Black

Mrs. Black died today.

Peacefully, it seems, and of natural causes. But still a shock for her to turn up missing at nightfall when it was time to close up the coop and say goodnight to our little backyard flock of pet chickens.

A quick search of the garage, where a few months back she had managed to hide and gave us a scare, produced nothing. We found her curled up underneath my daughter's backyard climbing-castle-thing; one of those plastic, brightly colored things that kids love these days. Mrs. Black had no marks on her and seems to have slipped her earthly bounds quickly and quietly with no fuss.

Mrs. Black was a Chicken Hell feed store rescue and had health problems from the start, along with having almost no feathers on her skinny little body. One eye was swollen shut and weeping fluid and she wheezed something awful. Seeing her in that horrible place I hadn't expected her to last long, but couldn't stand to walk away and leave her there. We bought her and brought her home after a trip to the vet for medication. She spent two months inside the house getting well, fattening up and growing feathers. Her eye, which I had doubted was even still there, healed up and turned out fine. She got her name from my then 2 year old daughter, who walked by her one day and said, "Oh...hello Mrs. Black!" Mrs. Black had a quiet dignity and could stand next to you for several minutes before you realized she was there.

We will miss her sweet nature, wall-eyed stare and her raspy-voiced burblings. Just this afternoon she had come running with the rest when I passed out a handful of strawberries and all was right with the world. Just yesterday I stopped on the back porch to give her a quick pet.

I know some people will read this and think, "It was just a chicken!" What most people don't know is how personable, smart and cheerful chickens are and what terrific pets they make.

Tomorrow we will bury her in a bed of cut flowers, under the bay tree by the back fence.

Goodbye Mrs. B.