Another one: Agate takes flight. With a little help from a hawk, apparently.

Photo copyright Aji, 2018; all rights reserved.

Here we go again: Agate this time, one of the silvers. I can't tell for sure at this late date, but I think she might be the one on the left in the opening to the hay bales, the one with a single white patch showing. Her name came from the fact that, unlike a lot of Silver-Laced Wyandottes, the white in her feathers was less spots, more banding.

And I think we did the dogs an injustice yesterday.

This afternoon, they were in the studio with Wings when the deed apparently went down. No one heard or saw anything until Wings saw Coyote notice a pile of feathers and go to check it out. He came and got me. It was odd: Two piles of feathers, right next to each other, all arrayed in circles of sorts, as though the feathers had simply fallen off and drifted downward onto their backs. No chicken anywhere; we searched all over. I did think I heard her once, but where the sound came from? Nothing there. Ghost chicken.

The thing is, there was no feather trail. No blood trail, either. Had it been one of the dogs, or even a coyote (the real kind, not the trickster pup), there would've been both. ::Sigh:: this drought is murderous. Everything is hungry now, and dry, too. There's no food, no prey. And the Swainson's have young way up in their nest in the cottonwood stand across the road; they have to eat. It was a spotlessly clean kill and removal, and that indicates a raptor.

Also, yesterday? Maybe a trial run. Wings thought he was catching Coyote at the kill (or at least the feed thereafter), but now we think maybe she had just run the hawk off instead. Because . . . well, without going into too many gory details, let's just say that when a raptor decides to feed where it kills? There are certain features to the how of it, features that show up in the damage to the carcass. Thinking back, it fits.

If so, we owe Coyote an apology. We owe one of a different sort to Agate, and to Marigold, too. Needless to say, the girls won't be coming out of their run for a few days (in addition to the actual coop where they sleep, they have the run of the old hay barn in which it sits, and a large fenced-in run out behind it, so they can still range freely, if not nearly so far afield). And given how few rodents there are around (since there's no water to be had, for love or money), we need to pray harder for rain, apparently.

We love you, Agate, and you, too, Marigold.







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