And then there was one...

Elijah holding Scarlett

Just after 5 A.M. on Christmas morning I heard some banging and clucking and general struggling right outside our bedroom window. Not sure if I was dreaming I woke Mike up and said, "I think something is attacking our chickens!" He jumped out of bed and ran outside - with no glasses and saw some sort of commotion over by our house. The top half of the chicken coop door was open and he saw an animal so he ran towards it. He said he made some sort of "ch-ch-ch" noise(?) and the animal ran away with Scarlett in tow. It seems to have been a large raccoon that climbed up and opened the top half and got inside and stole away our cute little hen. We were soo sad. I was outside by this time and Mike got the other hen and put her inside her little house inside the coop and locked it in. We had stopped doing that because we felt the coop was secure enough. Not so, I guess. So we are down to just one. We are planning on getting some full grown hens pretty soon to give Mermaid some company. She seems lonely for sure. So we feel generally bad for her because she's had to watch as her three friends have one by one been picked off. I am afraid we haven't been very good caretakers. We're learning though. The main thing we've learned is that we live in a freaking jungle and there is always some predator ready to come and eat our hens. Day or night. This is the only hen left - Mermaid. It's actually Ursula but Andrew refuses to believe his hen was the first to be eaten(by a hawk) so we have to call this one Mermaid.This is our little gals on their first night home. A lot of times with pets you regret them but with these I just regret that we don't still have all four. Aren't they cute? The only one left is the black one in the background.