{"id":3738,"date":"2014-11-26T00:40:08","date_gmt":"2014-11-26T00:40:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/?p=3738"},"modified":"2014-11-26T02:01:54","modified_gmt":"2014-11-26T02:01:54","slug":"excitement-at-the-coop-and-a-frazzled-hen","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/?p=3738","title":{"rendered":"Excitement at the Coop and a Frazzled Hen"},"content":{"rendered":"

If you have read my blog for very long, you know I have chickens.\u00a0\u00a0 I love my chickens.\u00a0 Their names are Dorcas,\u00a0 Beatrice, Phoebe, Freedom, Penninah, Jemima, Abigail and Ada.\u00a0 I take very good care of my girls.\u00a0 They are a little spoiled.\u00a0 If I open the back door, they come running to the garden gate to wait for their treats.\u00a0 Treats being leftover salad, pumpkins, sunflower seeds, bread(they go wacko over bread),\u00a0 or anything leftover from meals that the dogs won’t eat.<\/p>\n

I check them once or twice a day to be sure they have water and feed in the feeder.\u00a0 Every night David goes on chicken patrol to be sure all the hens are on their roost.\u00a0 They are usually in their house before the sun is completely set.\u00a0 But tonight, one of them was missing.\u00a0 Abigail, the Silver Laced Wyndotte.\u00a0 The most beautiful chicken I have.\u00a0 Where was she?<\/p>\n

\"DSCN9735\"<\/a><\/p>\n

David took a flashlight and began looking for her.\u00a0 In every tree, over the neighbor’s fence(if she had escaped the yard we might never find her), all over the yard.\u00a0 I put on a coat and got a flashlight and began to look too.\u00a0 I looked behind and under and on top of everything in the yard and garden.\u00a0 I rechecked the chicken coop to be sure we hadn’t missed her.\u00a0 I couldn’t believe how awful I felt that Abigail might be lost to us forever.\u00a0 This makes me think of a story in the Bible about Jesus looking for the lost sheep.\u00a0 That lost sheep was so important to Him he left the others to go and find it.\u00a0 That is what I was doing with that lost chicken.\u00a0\u00a0 Then, I said a little prayer.\u00a0 I said, “Dear God, please help us find Abigail.\u00a0\u00a0 She won’t survive the night outdoors.”\u00a0\u00a0 Then I looked some more and then I looked behind a piece of lumber in the chicken coop and there she was.\u00a0 She had flown between the shed and the fence and gotten wedged in and couldn’t get out.\u00a0 Her wing was caught in the fencing.\u00a0 She must have been there for quite a while and put up quite a struggle\u00a0because she looked frazzled and almost dead.\u00a0 In fact, I thought she was dead for a second.\u00a0 My heart dropped.\u00a0Then David touched her and she clucked.\u00a0 He had to pull her out and if\u00a0a chicken could scream, she sounded like it.\u00a0 She was tramatized I could tell.<\/p>\n

David placed her on the roost in the coop.\u00a0 She was breathing so hard and was all fluffed up and her head hung down.\u00a0 Poor girl.\u00a0 Chickens have a way of beating another chicken when it’s down and Freedom hopped up on the roost and started picking on Abigail.\u00a0 I brushed her off the roost and told her she better leave Abigail alone.<\/p>\n

This is the first time I thought I had lost one of my hens and I realized I am entirely too\u00a0attached to them.\u00a0 My dad never mourned a dead chicken.\u00a0 If one got eaten by a pig he’d just say, ” The pigs got another chicken,” and take a big bite out of the chicken leg he was eating.\u00a0\u00a0 If he found one dead in the chicken yard he would throw it over the fence to the pigs.<\/p>\n

Speaking of chickens, I have been cooking one all day to make broth to make chicken and dumplings for Thanksgiving.\u00a0 I didn’t know this particular chicken so I don’t feel bad about eating it.<\/p>\n

Hope you have a blessed Thanksgiving and give thanks to the One who provides all we need.\u00a0 Bye.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If you have read my blog for very long, you know I have chickens.\u00a0\u00a0 I love my chickens.\u00a0 Their names are Dorcas,\u00a0 Beatrice, Phoebe, Freedom, Penninah, Jemima, Abigail and Ada.\u00a0 I take very good care of my girls.\u00a0 They are a little spoiled.\u00a0 If I open the back door, they come running to the garden […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3738","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-pets-i-love","category-the-chooks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3738","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3738"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3738\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3744,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3738\/revisions\/3744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3738"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3738"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3738"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}