Chicken Math, Minus Two
I lost two chickens this week, in two different coops, for what look like two completely different reasons, and I've spent the last few days doing that quiet farm-math where you're not devastated, but you're also not exactly fine — you're just recalculating the flock count and feeling a little heavier about it than you'd like to admit out loud.
The first one was in with my fancy chickens — the coop I keep locked up separate because that flock and my main group have never once gotten along, and I finally got tired of playing referee between birds who apparently have Opinions About Each Other. No obvious injuries on her. No blood, no wounds, nothing that told a clear story. My best guess is she got trampled or crushed in some scuffle, because chickens are a lot meaner to each other than people expect from an animal whose entire vocabulary is "buk." Sometimes there's no dramatic cause. Something in the pecking order goes sideways for thirty seconds, and a bird just doesn't get back up, and you're left standing there feeling like you should've seen it coming from an argument you weren't invited to.
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The second one was harder, if I'm honest, and this is the one I keep turning over. She was part of my free-range group — the ones who spend the day wandering the property doing whatever chickens do out there and then, every evening, walk themselves back into the coop to be shut in for the night, which still strikes me as a small miracle every single time. Loyalty, or habit, or just really good instincts about foxes — I'll take it either way. She'd seemed fine, right up until she very much wasn't. Blue discoloration across her belly, maggots already at work, and a smell that told me the whole story before I'd even really looked. She died last night. Whatever had gotten into her had clearly been building for a while, which is the frustrating part of free-ranging — the whole appeal is that you're not hovering over them every minute, and the trade-off is that something can go wrong for days before you're standing close enough to notice.
I grew up on a farm, so none of this is news to me in the abstract. Animals die out here — old age, predators, something invisible working away until it isn't invisible anymore, or occasionally just a bad afternoon in a coop full of birds with grudges. Knowing that doesn't make it easy, and honestly, I hope it never does. I still hate watching an animal suffer. I still feel that little gut-punch every time I find one too late to help, even when I know full well there was nothing to catch. That's just the toll of keeping animals instead of, say, a hobby that doesn't occasionally require a shovel and a moment of silence.
What gets me is how differently these two losses sit with me, even three days apart. The first one was probably fast — a bad moment, over before it started, the kind of thing you can almost make peace with by dinnertime. The second one was slow, and slow is always the harder one, because it means there was a window somewhere where I might have caught it, if I'd been standing in the right spot with the right eyes on the right day. I wasn't. That's the deal you make when you let a flock roam free instead of watching every one of them like a hawk — which, ironically, is also a thing I'm now watching for.
Meanwhile the rest of the flock is out there right now, utterly unbothered, pecking at the ground like nothing happened, because as far as they're concerned, nothing did. Chickens have the emotional memory of a Roomba. I'll be the only one in this house still thinking about it by the weekend — probably while restocking feed and doing that math again, the one where two fewer eggs a day somehow feels like it means a lot more than two fewer eggs a day.
