I had just come back to the Nursery from lunch at home, when Kim sent me this picture with the caption: “Everyone is accounted for.”

In our 6 years of having chickens, this has never happened before. I think back in 2017 or 2018, I wrote a newsletter about a hawk watching our then young chickens from a vantage point on the coop roof. At the time, hawks could swoop down on our chickens pretty easily. But since then, we’ve enclosed a little chicken-yard with a fence that is about 4 – 5 feet high. That fence means that a hawk would need a really steep descent to get into the coop, and since we’ve had the fence, we’ve not seen a hawk anywhere near the hens.

Not sure how this one got in, we didn’t see it fly in, but when Kim looked out, it was having a standoff with our little flock, who were all cowering behind the door to their coop. And you probably can’t tell from the picture, but it is an enormous hawk. At least the size of our chickens, if not larger. Kim ran out, and the hawk flew up into one of our trees and began squawking away to show her disappointment in missing a meal. (She is welcome to eat as many squirrels from my yard as she’d like…maybe I’ll make some billboards like Chick-fil-a: “Eat mor squirrel.”) Our old biddies were so scared, they were willing to get locked up in the coop in the middle of the day. Usually, they fight us about going into the coop until it’s about 8:30 pm or so.

Fortunately, all hens are accounted for. It’s been seven years since we started our chicken-raising journey, and our flock is starting to get a little older and a little smaller. That will hopefully change this fall with the arrival of some new chickens that lay some really cool colored eggs. But that’s for a future newsletter. For now, I’m glad that our little flock is safe, and hopefully they aren’t too frightened to keep on laying fresh eggs.