Bye Bye, Bumblefoot

   It's all my fault. There's no way around it. Two weeks ago, I was not feeling well and decided I was too tired and nauseous to close my hens into their coop. I arose late the next morning and my husband delivered the bad news, "Something got two of your hens last night." The perpetrator left a couple telltale signs behind, so Carl did what every 20th century Jeremiah Johnson does: a Google image search. Actually, he joked that he found the answer on predatorscat.com and, silly me, I believed him (even repeated the joke a couple of times--guess the joke's on me). Nonetheless, he found a picture that looked exactly like the pile of poop along the fenceline, full of my Amish neighbor's raspberries, bits of plant matter and unidentifiable animal parts.

    A fox. It should have been obvious. We see them darting across the road illuminated by our headlights, and thekits cry unnervingly like screaming babies at night. When I first got the chickens, I worried incessantly about raccoons, eagles and foxes. Rebecca Zook told me she lost her entire first flock to a fox; she couldn't bring herself to get more for several years. But I had never even seen one near the house and quite frankly, I'd gotten complacent. Foxes are omnivores, and will eat everything from berries and grains and small mammals to cat food, garbage, eggs and yes, chickens. That night, they ate two of my beautiful red New Hampshires, including poor Bumblefoot, leaving nothing but a few fluffy feathers behind. To survive only to be ripped from her perch by a fox...tragic.
   The phrase "sly like a fox" is well earned. This fox surveyed the entire perimeter of my outer fence, found her way in under the plastic fencing where one of the stakes had broken, into the inner fenced in area, into the yard and finally into the henhouse where my flock slept in blissful ignorance on their new, expansive perch. She most likely grabbed one and dragged it back out through my maze of fences and then SHE CAME BACK FOR MORE. It's really quite sinister. I guess I have to be grateful those two nice, plump hens filled her up. We didn't hear a thing, even though every window in the house was open.
  A few days later, we were in Ocean City for a few days vacation. There were signs on the condo doors and every evening I could hear excited calls from the balconies overlooking the fenced-in dunes. A mother fox was raising her three kits in plain view of hundreds of beach-goers. Apparently, Ocean City has a growing urban fox population. Most of the visitors were enthralled, delighted. A family we met made a remark about them as we lounged one day by the ocean. "Forgive me if I'm not excited about the foxes," I said sourly. "One just killed two of my hens." At that point, I became the rare species at the beach, as the fascinated father questioned me at length about my chicken-raising, regarding me with interest and wonder.