Pittsburgh chickies head to a small island in Maine for the year

Hey, it's fun to see chickens in the news back home.  Nice aticle and video... but i must admit after chicken-sitting Shelly Danko Day's flock for her while she was on vacation in May, and being beaten and kicked to a pulp by her rooster "Scrappy", I was not happy to see that he was the star of the show, ha!

 My daughter and i and our four Plymouth Rock banties are slowly settling into our little cottage and meadow across from the Isle au Haut School in Penobscot Bay, Maine.  My daughter Maddie is having a fabulous experience in the one room school with seven other kids... one of the teachers is a friend of the family and she encouraged our wild hare of an idea to spend a year on the island.  The funny thing is that we thought we would be unusual hauling our city chickens way up and out and down east, but many of the families here on the island have chickens, too.  I guess we're not the only ones hoping for good fresh eggs. 

The three "bigs" at the school (6-8th graders are called "bigs", anyone 9 and under is a "little", everyone else is a "middle") told my daughter and I that we had better secure the chickies a bit better when they saw that we let them free range most of the day.  One kid said he lost all thirty of his ducks in one weekend to coyotes, "Gol, it were a bloody mess".  Hmmm.

Sure enough, the next day, we heard a comotion and ran to the back window to see a Cooper's Hawk sitting on the head of our smallest hen, Miss Mary Mac... we screamed in panic, as we had lost our favorite Rhode Island Red bantam, Queen Anne's Lace, to a resident Redtail Hawk in Highland Park two winters ago... this Coopers Hawk just looked at us and began pecking at Miss Macs terrified eyeball.  Good Lord, i couldn't take it, I ripped the screen from the casing and jumped out the back window, arms flailing til the hawk finally took off with the hen, dropping the poor girl about six feet into the air.   Skinny compared to the other hens, I guess Miss Mac was still plump enough... she thumped to the ground and flopped around, bloody head wagging this way and that, til I finally caught and scooped her up. 

Miraculously, after a bit of blood swabbing with our first aid kit, MMM didn't look so bad.  Nothing seemed broken, only her eye looked a bit bruised and the gash on her head wasn't pretty.  Next day, she was good as new, but I noticed her eye roamed the sky quite often.  Since then, we've decided the girls will only free range when we're out with them, otherwise I devised a Joel Salatin sort of contraption, a make-shift chicken tractor, to keep them on fresh herbage each day, but protected from those "red in tooth and claw"... I'll tell ya'll about my chicken tractor next time.

Greetings from Pittsburghers in Maine,
mbs
http://www.isleauhaut.net/