The Chicken

One day my wife discovered a white chicken wandering around on our nice ten acre property foraging for food. This chicken showed up sometime in late Spring, or early Summer of 2019. We were still trying to sell our old house at the time, but had some trouble with some dead-beat tenants who we had to evict first. The chicken kind of became a symbol of our ordeal as we prepared the house for sale. It appeared we were her people for most of the Summer and late Autumn.

The chicken was our good luck charm for most of the Summer all the way into late Autumn. While we didn’t know who owned the chicken, and we never really found out where she roosted at night. She would end up in the evening making her way towards the west side of our property and onto our neighbors property. Where she ended up after that is still a mystery, but we suspect she might have roosted in a small tree, or large bush that grew out of our neighbor’s ditch.

During the Summer the chicken seemed to find plenty of food to eat and never looked like it needed any help. We have a couple of pear trees and the chicken loved to eat the fruit the dropped to the ground. While she would never let us come too close to her, after some time she became comfortable enough to wander nearby while I was working in the yard. Oddly, she seemed to have no fear of my lawn tractor whenever I would cut the grass. She would follow in my wake after I passed by with the mower and agilely jump away whenever she as in my path. At times she would wait until the last second to move out of the way like we were playing chicken!

She would always be back the next morning, foraging along the row of pine trees we have in the front yard. Our cat, Smoke, had tried to catch the chicken many times throughout the Summer. She never really managed to catch her.

As Autumn approached and the season was getting colder, we started thinking about trying to capture the chicken and give it to a friend of mine who had a coup already. He had plenty of room for more chickens. Sadly, in the Spring he lost a couple of his own chickens to a villainous raccoon.

We started hashing out a plan to capture, and a time to arrange for the chicken’s transfer to his property once it was caught. He lived more than an hour away from us. Unfortunately, before we could get a cage setup and start baiting a trap for her, she disappeared. She simply never came back. We can only surmise that she finally ran into a predator that she couldn’t get away from. There are many possibilities around that could have taken her; coyotes, raccoons, possums and of course humans!