About 10 days ago, we had our first hint of what was really going on when one of our chickens died a mysterious death.
She just slowed down over the course of a day or so, and then my mother-in-law found the chicken, dead, in the driveway one afternoon. It had a wound on its underside that we thought, at the time, one of our dogs may have caused, or maybe I had hit the bird with the tractor or something.
But we soon discovered that neither the dogs nor my clumsy skills with garden equipment killed the chicken.
We were all sitting in the living room the other day when the predator snuck on the property and attacked one of “the ladies,” which is the term my wife uses when talking about her small flock of egg layers. She’ll lead them to the coop, making “peep-peep” sounds and saying, “Come on, ladies,” and the chickens follow her around the yard like eager puppies.
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So there we were, sitting in the living room watching television, when Sofia’s internal radar went off. She suddenly stood up without a word and walked out the front door.
I glanced at my mother-in-law to see if she knew why her daughter suddenly started behaving like a ghost had possessed her, but then Sofia started hollering.
Through the wall of the house I heard, “Andrew! Andrew! Bring the…” and the rest of the sentence was lost as I stood up and rushed out the door.
The first thing I noticed was that Sofia wasn’t in the front yard. She was 150 feet away, across the road that passes by our house, and she was running along the shoulder of the road waving her arms and yelling.
A little ways in front of her, a surprising amount of feathers were still fluttering and floating to the ground around a chicken that stood on the asphalt in shock, probably thinking to herself, “What the heck happened?”
And about 20 feet further down the road, a big red fox was sprinting hell-bent-for-leather down U.S. Route 1, as if he were ready to run all the way to Florida to escape the crazed human that was charging after him.
The fox ducked under the guard rail and disappeared in the trees between the road and the St. John River.
Sofia must have used the X-ray vision she developed as a mother to see the fox through the walls of our home as it snatched the chicken and ran across the road with it. But Sofia saved its life. We shooed the lucky bird back across the road, checked that she had only lost a bunch of feathers, and put all the birds into the safety of the coop.
Once the commotion had died down, I was looking out the front window when I saw the fox walking down the road, watching our house intently. It had come back for another attempt.
I called out to Sofia, “The fox is back.”
The fox heard my voice, and looked through the window right at me. His eyes said, “I will be back, and I know you will try to stop me, but I will be back.” Then he slinked back into the woods.
We’re still debating what to do. Sofia forbade me from killing the fox, and I’m unsure how to capture one alive. In the meantime, we are putting the chickens in their coop much earlier in the day, and we are encouraging the dogs to sleep in the yard rather than napping inside the house.
But it’s strange and a little unsettling knowing there’s a predator watching your home.