Chickens

Now, these are both joys and sorrows I have to express. In the beginning of August ( Aaaahh, those  summer days!), we ordered eight baby chicks from a hatchery in Ohio. However since it wasn't generally the season for chicks, we had to wait for a whole torturous week before they hatched and were sent to us as day-old adorable babies. We got a lot of different varieties, so that we would have some great layers and some extremely interesting ones. Here they are: one silver-laced wyandotte,  two buff orphingtons, one golden buff, two polish ( you know, the cute ones with crazy feather hairdos ), and three easter-eggers (aracaunas). We kept them in the garage in a guinea pig cage under a goose-neck lamp when they FINALLY arrived at the post office. After we received the call at nine o'clock in the morning, we scrambled to pull on clothes and scribble a note to the still asleep Rachel as we dashed out the door. When we came home fifteen minutes later with the lovies peeping in a cardboard box, Rachel was awake and waiting, bubbling with anticipation. We unpacked them and cooed over their adorableness, shrieking in excitement, and then the chicks were claimed. Rachel chose the wyandotte and christened her Anya, Ben chose one of the easter eggers and called her Spike, and Emma and I had already called dibs on the polish. Mine, Clementine, was a silver-laced polish, and Emma's, Lily, was a golden-laced. The golden buff was Mom's and named Buffy, and the last unclaimed ones were Faith, Willow, and Tara.( as somebody may have noticed, six of the eight were named after Buffy the vampire slayer characters. My parents are HUGE  Buffy fans!) So as they grew up bigger, my dad built a super-safe, raccoon-proof pen for them to live in, expertly attached to their little red coop (dad had made that too, years before, because we have owned chickens previosly) with a double layer of chicken wire on the walls, and on the top and bottom were single layers, so that there was no chance of anything digging in. But then a horrible thing happened. They were four weeks old and were living outside in their little chicken run when the next morning, they weren't there. They had randomly disappeared in the night, three. Spike, Tara, and Lily. We cried and discussed and my Dad re-closed the opening in the coop, the part attached to the pen, open all the time so they could come and go as they pleased. We wondered what had done it and hoped the rest were safe now. But next week, the culprit struck again. Anya disappeared without a trace. Then Clementine and Willow were gone. I will leave you as the mystery deepens, and see my next post for the whole story!