We learned long ago that chickens who don't come in at night don't last long, and it really only takes once. If you want to keep your chickens, you need to make sure they go in at night and lock them up against predators. My chickens live in a very nice chicken house that my beloved late husband built. It has an attached, enclosed yard with a sturdy metal roof over all. I don't let my chickens out every day, but when I do, I make sure to see them all in, come dusk.
Sunday was a beautiful Oklahoma spring day, so that afternoon I let the chickens out. As the day came to a close, I went out to see them in. I counted them: four barred rock roosters, two banty roosters, two mixed roosters, five red hens and two barred rock hens. Except there was only one barred rock hen. I counted them again, four, two, two, five - where is that other barred rock hen? I closed up the chicken house so they wouldn't get back out while I looked for that one hen and began my search.
Barred rock chickens' feathers are colored, black and white, in such a way that the birds appear to be striped, like bars of color, black and white, hence their name, Barred Rock. They are striking birds. In addition, the black and white striped configuration provides excellent camouflage. I looked and looked and looked for that hen. Wherever she was, she was well hidden. I prayed a blessing on her and came on in my own house for the night.
Later on, as usual, I let Annie the dog out one more time before we went to bed. When I went to call her in, she didn't come. I stepped outside and called again. I heard her tags rattle so I called again, but then I heard a sound I know to be the cry of a hen in distress.
I will digress here to say that I have never let Annie out loose when the chickens are out because she gets so excited I feared she might "play" too roughly with them. Annie has brought me more than one little deceased creature - mice, frogs, turtles, even a squirrel - that she has caught and just "played" to death. I do not want this to happen to my chickens. When I heard this hen squalling, I nearly panicked.
I grabbed the flashlight and, in my night shirt and fuzzy house shoes, ran toward the sound in my fuzzy house shoes yelling "Annie! Sit! Annie, sit!" Annie had "treed" the hen in a corner between some hog wire and the chain-link fence. The hen had tried to go through the chain-link, and was stuck and calling for help.
One very good thing about Annie is that she does sit when I tell her to, so I most emphatically told her to "Sit!" while I extracted the frightened hen from her predicament. I carried the hen into the chicken house and gently set her in one of the nesting boxes. She tolerated this very well and didn't kick up a bit of fuss, which was good because chickens are like toddlers - one cries, they all start crying. Her being quiet saved us all from a houseful of agitated chickens. The next morning I couldn't even tell which hen it had been. Really, it was as if nothing unusual had happened at all. Funny birds.
