The Death of a Little Red Hen

by Pa Rock
Farmer in Autumn

I am currently in my seventh year of puttering about my retirement farm - Rock's Roost - and still finding plenty to keep me occupied.   This year the big project has been the renovation of the pond, a hole in the ground that has been basically dry - or little more that a big puddle - for the time that I have lived here.  The previous owner brought in a man with a grader who pushed dirt around for a week or so and widened the hole considerably, but it still would not hold water.  This past year my son and. I - mostly my son - had a large stump removed from the center of what should have been a pond, and then brought in many bags of pulverized clay (a substance called "bentonite") to spread about the hole.  

A nice small pond has developed and it held a water throughout the summer.  This fall Nick added more bentonite to the edges of the pond in an attempt to expand it even further, and this morning it is raining so hopefully we.will see if his efforts have been productive.  Nick has put a few fish in the pond, and they seem to be surviving, and a small colony of frogs have appeared.  Normal pond vegetation is also starting to flourish.

Another farm enterprise, however, has not been very successful.  I bought baby chicks soon after arriving at The Roost and for awhile was successful at producing enough eggs for me, my relatives, and even the gang at Wednesday Night Pinochle.  But soon predators were drawn toward the girls in the coop, and the chickens began disappearing.  Over the years I have added to the flock, but the predators kept getting worse.  This spring I tried one more time, but the new birds were wiped out in two consecutive nights of predator attacks.

I had two smart chickens that have survived on their own for several years - a little Rhode Island Red hen and her big, handsome red rooster.   I would carefully close them into the coop each night, and they would roost of the rafters, and then in the morning, just before daylight, I would go out and open the coop so that they could be out on the ground as the sun was coming up.

This week I noticed the little hen was behaving oddly and tending to stay close to the coop even during the day.  Then, a few nights ago she quit roosting on the rafters and chose instead to sleep on a wooden shelf in the coop.   On Saturday morning I found her non-responsive on her shelf, and she died a short time later.

And now my entire poultry population has been reduced to one extremely lonely old red rooster - and he probably won't make it for long on his own.  If he is still here in the spring I will go to the weekly swap meet and find him a girlfriend, but until then it's going to be a long, lonely winter.

This is Monday, and I would have posted a poem in honor of the little red hen - I called her "Henny Penny" - but in scanning what was available on the internet, I discovered that I had already used all of the better poems about deceased chickens.  Dead birds seem to have become one of the constants of farm life.

Another farm constant is change.  Perhaps next fall we will be frying catfish that were caught in our pond. My son, the one who has been working so diligently on the pond, is also a great fisherman!