Disaster in the Hen House

At 6 am the alarm clock goes off and I head out to the barn to do the morning chores.  I feed the goats, the cows, and feed the chickens.  Then I open the henhouse to open the nesting boxes.  After sunrise, the solar-powered door opens and the chickens go out to roam on the pasture.  When I opened the door to the hen house, I was met with a startling sight.  There were feathers everywhere.  There were numerous carcasses of dead hens littering the hen house floor.  Carnage and savagery on display.  It was only a few months ago that we worked very hard to cement the floor of the henhouse where mink can't tunnel under and get to the chickens.  Mink had, you'll recall, killed 39 hens back then.  What in the world happened?  The surviving birds had witnessed a murderous rampage and I wondered if they had PTSD.

When I got back from work, I loaded the deceased into a wagon.  There were FIFTEEN dead hens.  Fifteen of them!  But I have a plan.  Like Wyatt Earp exclaimed in the movie, Tombstone, "You tell 'em I'm comin', and hell's comin' with me!"  Phase one of my plan is to gut all these chickens, so I sadly, but resolutely brought the wagon of death to the back patio.

Once I gutted all fifteen birds, I dug a big burial plot in the back of the garden.  If any good can come of this, it's that we're importing some fertility to the garden.  Tossing the birds in the burial plot, I covered them up.

I collected a nice collection of chicken guts.  I'll show you what I'm planning on doing with this in a future post.

Once that job was out of the way, I went to inspect the henhouse.  How could the mink get into my feathered fortress?  I closely surveyed the entire exterior.  And then... I found it.  There was a very small gap at the bottom of the door casing.  It is only an inch and a half wide by 1 1/2 inch tall.  That's more than enough room for a bloodthirsty mink.  They don't even eat the chicken.  It appears they suck the blood.  To fill this gap, I cut off a piece of 2x4 and nailed up the hole to prevent re-entry.

That night a contingent of hens that previously roosted in the hen house gathered in front of the rabbit hutches to roost where it's safe behind hardware cloth

They were exposed to a lot of violence.  I guess they've seen enough.  For that matter, I have, too.