…I hate you, I HATE YOU!

This is poor Irma. Her and her two (yes, that’s right, two) companions are shut into their run. We hate doing it to them. They hate it and us.

What they don’t realise is that their other two companions, Dusty and Babs, won’t be coming home again. They don't know that they are shut into their run for their own safety and so they don't also become fox food. Dusty and Babs were taken a couple of days ago by a predator, we assume a fox, in broad daylight. Babs was taken from not more than a dozen feet from our back door. We know that because that was where the pile of feathers that indicated her demise was found.

We are completely devastated to lose two hens in a day. That has never happened to us before and we’re pretty sure that we’ve not had a fox strike in more than 10 years, although we have lost a couple of hens that we’ve not been able to account for.

I suppose I could say we’ve been lucky although it doesn’t feel much like it at the moment. Poor Babs was only 5-6 months old and had only been laying for a couple of weeks. So, from our boosted group of a couple of weeks back until now, we’ve gone from 5 to 3 and only 2 of the 3 are laying, the third is an oldie whose laying days are over.