When Peter, my neighbor, told me that occasionally he would find an egg with a hole in it in one of the chickens’ nesting boxes, I wondered if the chickens might be stressed in some way and pecking their eggs. Shortly after that backyard, over-the-fence conversation, I noticed that my chickens were losing neck and back feathers from pecking each other. But what could be the cause of their stress? I would soon find out.
Is that a chicken screaming?
Sitting at my makeshift office desk near the screen door of what will some day be my beautiful master bedroom, I was working on a new book for my publisher when I heard one of the chickens cackling, like they do when they have just finished laying an egg. But this cackle was different—high pitched, loud, and seemingly endless—just how I would imagine the sound of a chicken screaming.
I leaped up and dashed out the screen door to the chicken house to find Nervous Nellie flying from her nesting box into the yard. Standing motionless and barely breathing at the door of the hen house, I heard a thump, and then I saw it.
Don’t look at me like that
The beady eyes of a rat stared back at me from where he had poked up from under the floor that butts against the tool shed. His head was the size of coffee cup. He wasn’t cute like the rat in Disney’s Ratatouille. He was an opportunistic critter looking for a meal.
“Oh, no you don’t,” I said, snatching the still-warm egg.
Who scared Nervous Nellie?
Who can hunker with a rat hovering?
Who wouldn’t be stressed by a rat showing up in her special place? Laying hens like to hunker down privately in the nesting box to do their egg-laying. Sometimes two will even sit tightly together.
I figured we’d have to build that new chicken house or we’d have no eggs and chickens with no feathers. Alternatively, as my husband so logically advised, we could just seal the rat’s hole and give ourselves another month to weather- and rat-proof our own house.
If we hustled, we could do the repairs to the chicken coop and still have a month to work on our little farm house before the November rains arrived. So after a hearty breakfast of eggs, homemade yogurt, warm pita wedges, slices heirloom tomatoes from the garden and an olive oil/thyme seed spread, we’d head out to plug that rat hole and let Peter know, in case the rat showed up on his side of the fence.
