The Family *roll

The outside portion of the coop (there's a chicken door (a former window) heading into the indoor coop in the garage

It has been a week of chicken-related highs and lows. Last Saturday, Eleanor, Emily, Dan H. and I drove out to a local farm to buy two chickens. As you may well know, Dan and Bonnie already have chickens. They had four chickens until very recently when Betty mysteriously died (RIP). I won’t bore you with the details, but in the course of your typical, “Where is the coop going to go from here?” discussions in the wake of a chicken’s death, we offered to buy chickens for the coop and pitch in with food costs  in exchange for some eggs. The Heeler-Roll egg co-op was born.

Kathy. What a fine looking chicken.

Back to the farm. We chose a beautiful Brown laced wyandotte and a lovely California white. We solicited name suggestions on Facebook, where Emily’s friend (and Eleanor’s godmother) Bridget naturally (?) suggested we name a chicken after her. Well, we couldn’t honor one godmother without honoring the other (Eleanor has two godmothers, no godfathers), so Bridget (California White) and Kathy (Brown laced wyandotte) joined Beyonce, Olivia & Maxine in the coop. As we are fond of saying, while Eleanor’s godmothers are far away (Ottawa and Tuscon), her godmother hens are very nearby.

We were still in the glow of recent chicken acquisition when we headed over to Dan and Bonnie’s on Wednesday. We let the chickens out of the coop to tool around. After 1o minutes or so, we corralled them back into the coop. Except for Kathy. She had disappeared into the woods behind the coop and was nowhere to be seen. “Don’t worry, she’ll come back,” Dan said. “And if she doesn’t, she’s just a chicken.” Ahso. Now Dan and Bonnie were out of town from Thursday until today, so we were on chicken duty anyway. We checked the coop at twilight nightly in the hopes that Kathy had returned, but with no luck. After two days, we assumed she had become food for one of the many hawks one routinely sees circling overhead in these parts. So sad. We tried to get an POW-MIA flag to hang from Dan & Bonnie’s garage (we were going to glue a red comb to the top of the POW’s head — very respectful, I know), but it turns out it’s not easy to find a POW-MIA flag and I could not bring myself to go to the VFW to ask for one (“Hi, I’m wondering if I can buy a POW-MIA flag.” “Do you know someone who is a POW or MIA?”, “Uhhh, sort of.”). We were all prepared to get another chicken — Kathy 2.

Well, it’s a good thing we didn’t. When I went by to check on the chickens today, the following note was stuck in the Heeler’s door:

(I put an apricot over the phone number)

Kathy is alive! She is not safe yet. Dan and Bonnie only get back late tonight so it falls to us to wrangle her back into the coop. I need to go a buy a large net. And then, in about 3o minutes, I will wildly be chasing a chicken around a stranger’s backyard. Wish me luck.

Believe it or not, this is only one of two exciting chicken-related stories from the past week. The next one will have to wait until the next post.

Update: Kathy has been successfully plucked from the tree she was roosting in and placed back in the coop. Yay!