Fluffy blogging on Friday | Life on a Colorado Farm

A Chicken Goes Missing

Mom-mom came up last night and said that a horrible thing had happened at her chicken pen…one of the hens was missing.

I, Fuzzy, was paying lots of attention to what was being said, but Boomer and Hank were not. So I continued to listen very carefully. In order to not repeat everything here are the high points:

Mom-mom only has four chickens
All the chickens love Mom-mom and let her pet them and the kids pack them around
The chickens are only allowed out of the chicken run when Mom-mom is home
Hank doesn’t get to stay close to the chickens because he gets that ‘gleam in his eye’ that Mom-mom doesn’t like
(You know the one whereby we dogs get that fixated look, the mouth begins to drool, and the ears are pricked forward and pointing right at the chicken)

Mom-mom let the chickens out to scratch and scramble in the yard

When it was time to come in for the night one chicken, Fluffy Cluck, didn’t return

There was no body, no pile of feathers, no evidence of any kind of what may have happened to Fluffy Cluck

I knew I was going to have to find out; it would also give me a chance to show Boomer how to find lost chickens.

I waited until Mom-mom and the kids and Hank went home, Mom and Dad finished their chores and went inside for the night.

It was a beautiful moonlit night. Boomer was up for the adventure so off we went. We took a short-cut through the little growing corn plants, if Dad saw us he would have yelled at us to get out of the corn field, but (he he) Dad was inside.

We made it down there in no time, I headed straight there, but Boomer had to follow his nose everywhere but straight. That boy!

Once there I told Boomer what we were up to and what we had to do—find Fluffy Cluck! I bet she was somewhere in the yard or under a bush pile, maybe down by the goat pen hiding out in the jump’n pile.

See Mom-mom puts these logs all together so the two goats can climb and jump and play ‘King of the Mountain’ if they want too.

We checked to see if Hank was hanging out until it was time for him to go inside and sleep next to Blade’s bed, he wasn’t outside.

I was a little disappointed I thought it might give me a chance to teach Hank something too.

Anyway off we trotted to the hen house….yep everything was locked up tight, no open doors, the big human door was shut, the door to the run was shut, I had Boom jump up to see if the nest boxes were closed (he enjoyed that) yep– they were. The gate to the run was shut.

Good. All as it should be.

Now to find the hen or what happened to the hen.

Boomer was all business, I showed him the smell of Fluffy Cluck, Boomer had never smelled real live chicken before so for a little while for Boomer to focus.

Once we got all the odors separated out we set out to find out what happened to Fluffy Cluck.

That was one busy bird…whew! Took us at least an hour to follow her zigzag all over the yard, she was here and she was there and she was everywhere. Gradually we sniffed our way to the goat pen…just as I thought. There she was.

We had a long talk with her…she was pretty sleepy and had a hard time focusing but I think we convinced her that she really needed to sleep with the rest of the girls at night.

She told us she had planned on it but she was really enjoying scratching around in the wood pile and when she realized how late it was she was just way too sleepy to make it back to the hen house.

Satisfied that we had accomplished what we sat out to do-Find Fluffy Cluck– we headed back home. We got there just ahead of the time when Dad goes out to check the water (around 1:00 in the morning) so we went with him instead of to bed.