A Hen House Story

 

First of all, look what I found in my very weedy-waterlogged flowerbed! It was the nicest surprise. I didn't expect to find a hyacinth bulb open this early. I looked around and I found this pink one getting ready to open.

Its like finding treasure.

 

This is Sasha in her chair. She sits here while I sew or hook or do my Bible Study. Its a nice way to spend the day. I forget she is a dog. Today I remembered.

This is true confessions. The truth of the matter is I have a mouse problem in my chicken coop. I knew in the fall when I saw a few mice with their baggage moving in we were going to have either rain or cold or both. I haven't had mice in my coop since Ron built it. I thought I would just ignore it and maybe the cats would take care of the problem.

I go down every night and lock my hens inside of their little house. It is safer for them and helps me sleep at night. The other night when I went down, all I could hear was lots and lots of squeaking. I came back up to the house and told Ron that I had a problem, there was either lots of mice living under my chicken house or we had lots of bats in the trees. I knew I had to look at the mouse issue for real. I then started with thinking do I lock the cats in there at night? Or do I set a ton of mouse traps at night? That last one gave me the shivers.

This morning

I went down this morning to let my hens out of the hen house, when I saw that during the night a skunk had solved my problem. I have never been so glad to have a skunk dig under my coop but I was and I didn't even bury back the hole. He can come back tonight.

I went in my coop, and I knew I had to turn over my feeders to see if there was any mice under them. There was a lone mouse. It ran from my little feeder to the big feeder. I turned it over and it ran to my automatic chicken waterer. I turned that over and I make this sound that I am incapable of not making when I see a mouse, its kind of a scream. Sasha runs to me when ever I make that sound. I let her in and pointed to that  mouse. Sasha never kills anything but she bit that mouse. Then proudly carried it out in the yard and dropped it and looked at it. The cat had come down too and was very interested. I picked up a stick and was trying to flip that mouse to the cat when Sasha grabbed that mouse and the tail was sticking out of her lips and promptly ate it. Just swallowed it down after a few crunches. Just like that. I am not much of a farm girl I tell you because I wanted to gag. I had to go walk around and take deep breaths of cold air.

See our last tumbleweed pile.

I don't mind when the cats catch mice but Sasha well that's different. I have been calling her mouse breath all morning. My brain keeps having all of these terrible thoughts and wanting to write stories about how carnage came to the chicken coop last night. From the mouse point of view. I have to make myself stop. They are rodents, vermin who carry disease. They do not look like cute mice like in Cinderella or Beatrix Potter. But in my mind they do sort of because as Elliot said, they are corn fed mice. I will let Mr. or Mrs Skunk enjoy  the mice then I will bury the hole back in and problem solved. With very little effort on my part.

That rainbow looks like it came down on Ron's shed.

Can you see the double rain bow in this last picture? It was a very nice rainbow. Well need to go bake a birthday cake. February is a nice month for birthdays. Elliot likes Fun Fetti cake, but I make it from scratch and use lots more sprinkles.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend. This post was really going to be about all of the wool I dyed this week. Maybe later. I got the best reds and blues.

Thank you for visiting today.

~Kim~

Perhaps, after all, our best thoughts come when we are alone. It is good to listen, not to voices but to the wind blowing, to the brook running cool over polished stones, to bees drowsy with the weight of pollen. If we attend to the music of the earth, we reach serenity. And then, in some unexplained way, we share it with others.
Gladys Taber