Observe and report

I woke up one morning and wanted chickens. I don’t know why. I just did. I mentioned it to my long-suffering husband Eddie, who said, “You’re kidding, right?”

I gave it a week. I still wanted chickens. So I asked Eddie to make a coop (he’s handy). He ignored me. I think he thought I would forget about it. I didn’t.

I went to a feed store and took a picture of a coop. I researched coop designs. I drew the plan and gave it to Eddie. He sighed and went into the garage.

The coop is a fancy, two-story affair with a covered run. The back is chicken wire and we put it up against one of our sunroom windows so that we could check on the chickens and egg production from the comfort of our home.

I made friends at the feed store. They called me when a new batch of chicks arrived. Eddie and I picked out two Araucanas, a Rhode Island Red and a Sex Link. I named them Heidi, Terri, Trish and Linda after four good friends.

All was well for almost a month. We kept them inside until it was time for them to move into the coop.

The weekend after the big move-in, we went out of town and left the neighbor girl in charge of checking on them. Her dad called us on Saturday night to report there had been a mishap.

We returned home to find an unpleasant scene. Only Trish was still alive. We called her namesake. Human Trish said, “Of course she was the smartest one.” Human Terri was very sad. Human Heidi wanted a forensics expert called in. Human Linda couldn’t be reached for comment at the time.

We had a dilemma: We didn’t want Trish to be lonely, but we couldn’t add an adult chicken in with her, or more chicks because of pecking order issues. We decided to wait until she was full-grown, then add a friend.