Our Chicken Friend

Due to that fact that we have spent all of our free time and energy on repairing and cleaning up the house, we have embarrassingly let our yard go. This has resulted in many scavengers to our backyard orchard and the overgrown garden. One morning on his way back from hanging laundry, Joe noticed something strange out of the corner of his eye by the side of the house. At first the odd sight startled him, but then he couldn’t help but laugh at the absurdity of the scene. There, perched in a cracked plastic basin balanced on two beer bottles lying over a rotted hole in an old wheelbarrow sat a chicken protecting her eggs. Unbelievable! Over the next few weeks, the chicken became a constant source of amusement. It seemed that NOTHING could scare her off her eggs. People could get as close as they wanted, rain storms would flood her nest and matt her feathers, wind would send debris flying into the wheelbarrow, and the chicken still refused to budge. We began to anticipate the birth of our own flock of chickens (hoping and praying that none would be roosters). The story escalated when Joe came home early from school one day and was immediately greeted with a horrific odor. In an attempt to locate the source, Joe systematically searched the surroundings. It didn’t take his nose long to locate the rotting eggs. It seems as if our chicken friend had removed only one of the rotten eggs from her nest and undeterred, continued to sit on the others. Joe was able to remove the exiled egg from our yard, but had no way of getting rid of the others as the chicken was guarding them with her life. We spent the next few days holding our noses, constantly on the look-out for an opportunity to steal the remaining rotten eggs. We have come to the conclusions that chickens must not have the ability to smell and that we never again want to be the last ones anywhere.