Copper and the Coyote

It is a cold and drizzly evening. We are expecting a late freeze tonight as we light the fire in our wood stove, probably the last cozy fire we will have this spring.

Sitting down at the dinner table to enjoy a healthy salad, I heard a hen clucking like crazy right behind me outside the dining room window.  This is very unusual behavior from our chickens, since they have never, ever ventured this far up towards our house. The coop is way down the driveway from the house, approximately 160 yards away.

We continue eating, waiting for the hen to jump up on the back porch and peek inside the windows of the french doors to watch us eating, but the clucking went on without her appearing.  I got up and went outside to see what was going on. Mara and the two Welsummer sisters were nervously clucking and peering around  the far south side of the house, and then I noticed Mr. Knightly and Emma on the north side of the house, running up into the woods. Very strange behavior for my birds…but I didn’t take it seriously, as I should have.

I went back inside to eat my salad, thinking I would take care of the chickens when I finished dinner, when out the front window I saw what looked like a brown and black animal running across the field…I thought maybe there were two dogs running together, a black one behind the brown one, but a little ahead of it…

I placed the arrow in the picture above so you can see where the animals were running. The animal closest was about the color of the hay, but what I realized was the black animal  was probably one of the chickens. It was some kind of animal running away from the coop with one of my chickens in it’s mouth!!!

When I told my family what I had seen, my son immediately exclaimed, “A coyote!”

Coyote ~ Wikipedia

I grabbed my barn boots and jacket and ran down to the barn as fast as I could, my husband not far behind me. Finding one Marans hen in the coop peacefully laying an egg, and  totally unaware of what was going on outside, I counted 5 hens and one rooster… that meant there was one rooster and 3 hens not accounted for…

And then I saw the feathers…

And further on I saw Copper’s tail feathers…

And more feathers down in the creek…

We looked for paw prints, but couldn’t find any…

My husband and son looked further down the road, but spotted nothing. And then as my son started looking towards the woods, Copper the valiant rooster came swaggering out into the field… He looked dazed and wet and his tail had been completely plucked…I wrapped my jacket around him and took him back to the coop…

Remember Copper…

Here he is now…

Poor thing, but he is alive…definitely a changed rooster…

Hopefully he will feel better in the morning.  Another of the Marans hens had been up in the woods with Mr. Knightly and Emma. Now there were only 2 missing. What  a surprise when Ruby Hen came out of the woods, a little wet and scruffy with a few of her tail feather’s missing, but clucking away cheerfully.  I just wish I could understand what she was saying…

Was she perhaps saying how valiant Copper was that he distracted that coyote from her and took him on, risking his life?  We’ll never know.  I tried to get a picture of the back of Ruby, so you could see some of her feathers were gone, but she was running around so quickly I couldn’t get a shot that wasn’t a bit blurry…

This is not the end of this story. We have one hen not accounted for, but I haven’t seen any of her brown feathers, so I’m hoping that she is still alive and hiding somewhere. The coyote will be back. We have 3 traps set up for it.  It’s just a matter of time.

Now I have to figure out how to protect the hens until we capture the coyote…